Tools for Humanity, the company behind Sam Altman's iris-scanning Worldcoin project, has dropped hints that it may soon collaborate with major technology and financial companies, according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. Bloomberg.
“There are some natural things in the way we can and will work together, but that's not something we're ready to announce yet,” said Alex Plania, CEO of Tools for Humanity, regarding the potential partnership with OpenAI. Plania added that the company had “conversations” with PayPal, but there were no “concrete” developments.
A Tools for Humanity spokesperson said luck“We don't have anything else to share at this time.” PayPal and OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment.
The collaboration with a major technology company would not be a first for Worldcoin. Last year, the company worked with Okta, a cybersecurity company, to build a “Log in with Worldcoin” authentication service, which developers can use as an alternative or in addition to similar tools by Apple and Google, according to Bloomberg.
Three arrows partner Tools for Humanity received a $25 million funding round in October 2021 that valued the company at $1 billion, according to data from funding tracking firm Dealroom. Sam Bankman-Fried, one of the founders of FTX, was also an early investor.
What is WorldCoin?
According to its website, Worldcoin is “a free, open, privacy-preserving protocol that aims to be the world’s largest public identity and financial network.”
It hopes to verify one's “humanity” in the age of robots and deepfakes by asking users to stare at an orb, which then converts a person's biometric image into an impenetrable string of numbers. When combined with an algorithm, the code verifies that an individual is a unique human, providing confirmation via a global identifier, which is stored in the individual's global application. As a reward for scanning, users can drop Worldcoin tokens, which are currently priced at around $5.
“At this point, it's not a question of whether or not there will be proof of character, the question is will it be open source, decentralized, and privacy-preserving?” Thiago Sada, Head of Product at Tools for Humanity, said previously luck.
But orbs have been banned in several European countries over concerns about data collection; Germany is the only market where Worldcoin can currently collect biometrics. Moreover, others have noticed how Altman, co-founder and CEO of Tools for Humanity, is selling a solution to issues that another of his companies, OpenAI, is accelerating.
The rate of new interest in the plan remains unclear, as the market capitalization of Worldcoin tokens has nearly halved over the past month, to about $942 million, according to CoinGecko data.
In an effort to expand adoption, the Worldcoin Foundation, the company behind Worldcoin, last week announced World Chain, an open source, permissionless, layer 2 layer expected to launch in mid-2024. The blockchain will be deeply intertwined with the Worldcoin protocol and will give preferential treatment to users with an ID worldwide.