In this update, we will briefly look at Worldcoin, which was launched by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI (the company behind ChatGPT).
​ | Bitcoin | Ethereum |
Price (1 July 2023) | $30’477 | $1’933 |
Price (31 July 2023) | $29’206 | $1’853 |
% Return | -4.1% | -4.1% |
Worldcoin is a new project, and its token was launched in July. Its aim is to be a digital passport and create a form of identity / human verification. To have a Worldcoin wallet, called WorldID, one needs to have their eye scanned by an orb, and in return will receive 25 WLD tokens, worth around $50 at current prices. Unsurprisingly, many signups have been in emerging markets where people have flocked to sign up. Kenya had over 350’000 signups in a week before the police have temporarily shut down signups pending investigations. Globally, there have been over 2 million sign-ups. For most, the concern around signing up is that it’s unclear how the biometric data is used and stored, and who owns it and how it could be used. Many experts are concerned it could be used to impersonate you.
Worldcoin’s signup rate proves how effective digital assets can be to seed a user base and drive network effects and user behaviour. Each user is incentivised to understand and learn how the WLD token works as this is what their pay out was in. But more importantly, it’s an interesting remedy to a world dominated by AI bots. As AI bots become more sophisticated, it will become harder to tell the difference between human and AI, and it’s interesting that one of the most dominant leaders in AI has released a project that aims to mitigate human impersonation, one of the major risks of AI. For example, Twitter could allow users to prove that an account isn’t a bot, limiting the influence of bot farms. The same could apply to online multiplayer games or dating apps.
Overall, AI and digital assets have significant synergies because of their fundamental differences, which is that AI will enable digital abundancy, while digital assets provide digital scarcity and a way for AI bots to interact with the resources they require. In the abstract, this is difficult to imagine, but in time users may pay a premium for roles performed by humans and not AI bots. For example, lonely elderly people may pay for a digital companion to keep them company and some may prefer to pay a premium for this to be a real person and not an AI bot. This is an area that is quickly growing, and I believe will be one of the narratives that drives crypto adoption in the future.
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