Coinspeaker
Worldcoin Raises $100 Million in Funding Round to Scan More Eyes

Worldcoin, an eye-scanning crypto startup, has raised $100 million from investors in a funding round that pushed its valuation to $3 billion. The Series B funding round included investors like Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures.

Worldcoin is a digital asset running on the Ethereum blockchain with the goal of distributing a globally acceptable income for everyone in the world. The project is a close relative to other crypto projects like Circles and Proof of Humanity with their humanitarian gesture.

According to available information, Worldcoin is looking to scan people’s eyes and give them crypto in exchange. The amount received is dependent on how soon a user allows them to scan his eyes and the more people join the project, the lesser the amount of crypto that would be shared.

Interestingly, Worldcoin had a Series A funding round where it raised $25 million at a $1 billion valuation in October last year. The round had some notable investors like Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), alongside Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, and Multicoin. Other investors included FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.

Funding Purpose

The new funding is coming at a crucial period for the crypto startup which had halted its operation in 7 countries it was operating in due to regulatory scrutiny and its inability to meet up with demands of local contractors, according to a Bloomberg report.

Already, the project has been able to scan close to 500,000 people in the 20 countries and its new funds would be used to further push its cause.

The report also revealed that the project has been forced to use smartphones for some of its registrations, especially in countries where flip phones are not available.

Project’s ‘Weird’ Nature Divides Community

Worldcoin is a unique project in the nascent crypto industry as it looks to catalogue the eyes of its users. Through its “the Orb” feature, the project is able to determine those whose irises have been scanned and also determine when the system is about to be gamed.

This level of uniqueness has drawn some level of interest within the world generally. According to Edward Snowden, the founder of Wikileaks, the project has the potential of being abused because hashes of the scanned eyes are being kept.

He went on to warn people not to “catalogue (their) eyeballs.”

In defense of the project, Sam Altman, the co-founder of the project, opined that everyone should have a right to determine what they want to use. He continued that “Worldcoin is more privacy-preserving than centralized services we use today. All Worldcoin, or anyone, could ever tell is if someone has already signed up for the service,” while also adding that “the hash is cryptographically decoupled from the wallet and all future transactions.”

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Worldcoin Raises $100 Million in Funding Round to Scan More Eyes