Parent firm of Worldcoin wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI: report (2024)

Quick Take

Worldcoin’s developer, Tools for Humanity, wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI, Bloomberg reports.
However, it’s unclear how far along the partnerships are or what exactly would come of them.
Nearly 5.1 million Worldcoin users in 120 countries scanned their irises in exchange for the cryptocurrency WLD.

Parent firm of Worldcoin wants to partner with PayPal and OpenAI: report (2)

The team behind the iris-scanning crypto project Worldcoin WLD -1.30% wants to collaborate with tech and finance heavyweights, Bloomberg reports.

Worldcoin's developer, Tools for Humanity, is interested in partnerships with the payments giant PayPal and the artificial intelligence firm OpenAI. However, Bloomberg adds that details of the partnerships are still unclear, and no concrete plans appear to have emerged yet.

Worldcoin

Worldcoin scans a person's irises with an orb to help prove that they're real humans and in exchange, the user can receive the cryptocurrency WLD.

WLD traded hands at $4.88 at 11:27 a.m. ET on April 25 after seeing a 4.20% price decrease in the past day. According to The Block price page for the cryptocurrency, WLD has a circulating supply of 195.3 million and a market capitalization of $951.9 million.

The project plans to release an Ethereum Layer 2 called World Chain in the summer of 2024. The network aims to augment user onboarding into Worldcoin. "It will be open for everyone, and verified humans will get priority blockspace over bots as well as a gas allowance for casual transactions," Worldcoin wrote at the time of the announcement. "The network will be deeply integrated with the Worldcoin protocol to accelerate growth and leverage World ID’s Proof of Personhood. It will also be secured by Ethereum as an L2 and engineered for scalability with the Superchain ecosystem."

However, Worldcoin is not welcomed globally. Spain, Portugal and Kenya have all taken steps to block Worldcoin from scanning their citizens's irises. Still, Worldcoin's website touts nearly 5.1 million sign-ups across 120 countries, with over 2,000 orbs manufactured.

Tools for Humanity's chairman and co-founder Sam Altman is also the co-chair of OpenAI, developer of the popular generative AI ChatGPT.

Tools for Humanity, PayPal and OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Block's request for comment.

Update (Apr. 25, 21:57 UTC): Updated to clarify the process of how Worldcoin works.

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About Author

MK Manoylov has been a reporter for The Block since 2020 — joining just before bitcoin surpassed $20,000 for the first time. Since then, MK has written nearly 1,000 articles for the publication, covering any and all crypto news but with a penchant toward NFT, metaverse, web3 gaming, funding, crime, hack and crypto ecosystem stories. MK holds a graduate degree from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program (SHERP) and has also covered health topics for WebMD and Insider. You can follow MK on X@MManoylovand onLinkedIn.

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