OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is nearing advanced talks to secure funding for his planned iris-scanning cryptocurrency project, called Worldcoin.
What Happened: According to a Sunday report by The Financial Times, the company is reportedly in advanced talks to raise $100 million ahead of the launch of the digital currency, which aims to use eyeball-scanning technology to create a worldwide identification system for accessing cryptocurrency.
Altman founded Worldcoin in 2019 with Alex Blania, and earlier this month the company debuted a digital wallet designed for the Worldcoin ecosystem. Known as the World App, the digital wallet is intended to expand the availability of digital identity and global finance, and can be used to authenticate with World ID, obtain Worldcoin tokens, and send digital money anywhere.
Worldcoins unique approach to identifying users involves using iris scanning technology to ensure that each user is a human and not a bot or automated system. To achieve this, users look into a small orb-shaped device that captures their iris pattern and converts it into a biometric scanning code, which becomes their proof of personhood.
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Why It Matters: Despite ongoing concerns and volatility in the cryptocurrency space, Altmans project has managed to secure significant investment to date. It's a bear market, a crypto winter. It's remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment, FT cited an anonymous source.
The term crypto winter refers to a period of severe decline in the cryptocurrency market, marked by falling prices of assets like Bitcoin BTC/USD and Ethereum ETH/USD , decreased investment, and general market instability.
Altman, played a significant role in developing ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that uses deep learning models to generate human-like responses to textual prompts. This platform was one of the first to capture the public imagination, and it sparked a renewed interest in the development of AI systems, leading to a current race in the field involving major players like Microsoft, Google, and others.
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