In the last seven days, the price of Worldcoin's WLD token has increased by 186.42% after the company reached a milestone for daily active users.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, co-founded the cryptocurrency project Worldcoin, whose native token has increased by more than 186% in the last week as the number of daily users surpassed one million.
Worldcoin said on February 18 on X that over a million people had downloaded their cryptocurrency wallet app, called "World App." This is a huge increase over the 100,000 daily active users that the app had in November 2023.
Worldcoin, a self-described “privacy-preserving” digital identity verification project, was founded in July 2023 by Alex Blania and Altman. Users are compensated in the native cryptocurrency of the platform for scanning their iris images.
By giving each person on the earth a small quantity of their native WLD token in return for confirming their identification, Worldcoin aims to establish a global Universal Basic Income.
But Worldcoin's plans to implement a biometric identity system and a universal basic income have not been without controversy. These have mostly been focused on privacy issues with the company's metallic "Orbs" eye-scanning devices.
Citing "serious risks to personal data privacy," the Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data (PCPD) in Hong Kong opened an investigation into Worldcoin's local operations on January 31. As part of its investigation, the PCPD announced that it had entered six Worldcoin-controlled locations in Hong Kong and executed warrants.
Due to privacy concerns, the initiative has caught the attention of regulators outside of Hong Kong. As a result, its services have been fully suspended in Kenya, and iris scans in India have been put on hold.
Notwithstanding regulatory worries, the native WLD coin has increased in value by over 186% over the last week because of a broader upswing in the cryptocurrency market.
The increases in Worldcoin coincide with a number of significant OpenAI upgrades.
OpenAI debuted Sora, a new text-to-video generator that lets users create scenarios and video clips from text prompts, on February 16.
A week prior, on February 9, Altman declared his intention to raise an incredible $7 trillion to support the company in financing and expanding its development of semiconductor chips. Although the enormous cash amount caused some skepticism in the IT community, Altman didn't appear to be too bothered.