Not long ago, Sam Altman – the man who created the now infamous AI tool Chat GPT (which is designed to create content) – announced he was bringing a new digital currency called World Coin to the financial stage. The asset is now available for trading and has surged in price by more than 98 percent, thus jumping beyond the $3 mark.

World Coin is Here

Prior to its release, World Coin managed to garner more than $100 million in new funding from companies like Blockchain Capital and Tools for Humanity. At the time of the initial funding, Spencer Bogart – a general partner at Blockchain Capital – explained:

It was this idea of creating a new primitive for the internet that can enable any application to distinguish between machines and humans easily and quickly, or bots and humans. That was something that took me working more closely with our engineering team to really appreciate how big of a problem that already is.

Altman and his co-founder Alex Blania commented that the goal of World Coin is to make the case for a basic, universal income and to alleviate growing poverty around the world. Altman and Blania mentioned:

World Coin consists of a privacy-preserving digital identity (World ID) and, where laws allow, a digital currency (WLD) received simply for being human.

They continued by saying the asset could ultimately do away with fraud granted governments are willing to consider it as a useful tool, adopt it, and distribute it to citizens everywhere. They said:

World Coin is an attempt at global scale alignment. The journey will be challenging, and the outcome is uncertain, but finding new ways to broadly share the coming technological prosperity is a critical challenge of our time.

No doubt this all sounds fine and dandy. A currency that somehow alleviates poverty and helps to ensure poor people are no longer suffering sounds like a fantastic venture, but the currency is stirring controversy amongst some of the world’s leading digital currency developers and advocates.

Vitalik Buterin – the co-founder of Ethereum, the world’s second largest digital currency after bitcoin – commented in a recent interview that he worried about privacy given the asset requires eyeball scanning of users, thus infringing on their identities.

Is People’s Privacy at Risk?

He wrote:

There is no ideal form of proof of personhood. Instead, we have at least three different paradigms of approaches that all have their own unique strengths and weaknesses… It does seem like specialized hardware systems can do quite a decent job of protecting privacy. However, the flip side of this is that specialized hardware systems introduce much greater centralization concerns.

To use World Coin, users must first gain access to their unique World IDs and have their eyes scanned by what’s called “the orb.”

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