Worldcoin (WLD), the cryptocurrency token associated with Sam Altman’s digital ID venture, has surged over 200% in the past two weeks, reaching an all-time high of $7.95 on Monday.
This surge in price comes on the heels of milestones for both the Worldcoin project and Altman’s other venture, OpenAI.
On February 16th, OpenAI, the AI research organization co-founded by Altman, released a new text-to-video AI tool called Sora, sparking tremendous excitement in the industry. The following day, Worldcoin announced that its crypto wallet endeavour, the World App, had surpassed 1 million daily users, demonstrated “incredible” community support and suggested that the project is gaining traction despite facing a multitude of setbacks.
Further, the discovery of 75 million WLD, worth $550 million, owned by the Teneo, 3AC liquidator address has generated excitement among WLD token holders. According to a report by Wu Blockchain, the tokens were received from Worldcoin in August 2023 and have not been touched since. This revelation has sparked comparisons to Alameda’s large holdings of WLD tokens and speculation that the firms may ‘Hodl’ the token for longer, potentially contributing to a further price surge.
Notably, Worldcoin’s total market capitalization is rapidly approaching $1 billion, with its value growing 17% to around $962 million in the past 24 hours, as per CoinMarketCap data. It is now the 75th most valuable cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Worldcoin is an ambitious project that aims to solve the problem of verifying someone’s identity online by giving users a unique digital identity when they verify themselves in the real world with an in-person eye scan administered by a silver orb. Its crypto token WLD is part of a broader ambition to tap into booming interest in decentralized finance, and scanners were given tokens for signing up.
However, the project faced some problems rolling out, including data privacy concerns in Kenya, regulatory hurdles, and waning interest in countries like India, France, and Brazil.
That said, the surge in Worldcoin’s price follows a bumper week for crypto prices, with Bitcoin, the largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, up 4.4% from a week ago and Ethereum up 12.28% over the same period. Other leading cryptocurrencies, including BNB, SOL, XRP, ADA, and meme token DOGE, were also up between 2% and 15% over the last seven days.
At press time, WLD was trading at $7.34, reflecting a 17.57% surge over the past 24 hours. Its daily trading volume has jumped 171.49% over the same period to $1.42 billion.
