Tools for Humanity, the company behind Sam Altman’s iris-scanning project, Worldcoin, has dropped hints that it soon could be collaborating with major tech and finance companies, according to Bloomberg.
“There’s some natural things in how we might and will work together,” said Alex Blania, Tools for Humanity’s CEO, regarding a potential partnership with OpenAI. “But it’s nothing that we’re ready to announce yet.” Blania added that the company has had “conversations” with PayPal, but that there had been no “concrete” developments.
A Tools for Humanity spokesperson told Fortune: “We don’t have anything further to share at this time.” Neither PayPal nor OpenAI immediately responded to requests for comment.
A collaboration with a major tech firm wouldn’t be Worldcoin’s first. Last year, the company worked with Okta, a cybersecurity firm, to build a “sign in with Worldcoin” authentication service, which developers could use as an alternative or in addition to similar tools from Apple and Google, according to Bloomberg.
Three Arrows participated in Tools for Humanity’s $25 million funding round in October 2021 that valued the company at $1 billion, according to data from funding tracker Dealroom. FTX cofounder Sam Bankman-Fried was an early investor as well.
What is Worldcoin?
According to its website, Worldcoin is a “free, privacy-preserving, open protocol intended to be the world’s largest identity and financial public network.”
It hopes to authenticate one’s “humanness” in an age of bots and deepfakes by asking users to stare into an orb, which then converts one’s biometric image into an impenetrable string of numbers. When combined with an algorithm, the code verifies an individual as a unique human, providing confirmation via a World ID, which is stored in one’s World App. As a reward for the scan, users can be airdropped Worldcoin tokens, which are currently priced around $5.
“At this point, it’s not whether there will be proof of personhood—the question is, will it be open-source, decentralized, and privacy preserving?” Tiago Sada, head of product for Tools for Humanity, previously told Fortune.
But the Orbs have been banned in various European countries over concerns about data harvesting; Germany is the only market where Worldcoin is currently able to collect biometrics. Moreover, others have noted how Altman, the cofounder and chairman of Tools for Humanity, is selling a solution to issues accelerated by another of his companies, OpenAI.
The rate of new interest in the plan remains unclear, as the market cap of Worldcoin tokens has almost halved over the past month, to around $942 million, according to CoinGecko data.
In a bid to expand adoption, Worldcoin Foundation, the company behind Worldcoin, last week announced World Chain, a permissionless, open-source layer 2 that’s expected to launch mid-2024. The blockchain will be deeply entwined with the Worldcoin protocol and will give preferential treatment to users with a World ID.
