Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Token Soars on First Day of Trading

(Bloomberg) — Worldcoin, the token of the crypto project co-founded by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, rallied on its first day of trading on Monday as investors piled into the hype around artificial intelligence.

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Worldcoin jumped to as high as $3.58 from the initial price of $1.70 before falling back to $2.52 as of 11:12 a.m. in London, data compiled by CoinMarketCap data showed. By then, roughly $145 million worth of the token had been traded, after exchanges like Binance listed it.

Worldcoin, Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project which officially launched on Monday, uses a small device called an “orb” to scan people’s eyeballs in order to generate a a unique digital identity. That identity, or World ID, grants its holder “proof of personhood” in the Worldcoin parlance.

The coin’s initial supply is capped at 10 billion tokens, according to the project’s white paper. Monday’s launch consisted of 143 million Worldcoins, of which 100 million were loaned to market makers and the remainder allocated to investors who verified with the project’s Orb technology in the pre-launch phase.

Worldcoin won’t be available to trade in the US because of regulatory restrictions there.

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