Sam Altman’s Worldcoin goes live as exchanges open doors for WLD deposits

• The Worldcoin project has launched on Mainnet.
• Exchanges have opened the doors for WLD trading with some getting a share of the supply.

Worldcoin, the highly-anticipated cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, launched its Mainnet on 24 July, Semafor reported. According to the global news platform, it confirmed the development from sources familiar with the matter.

For context, Worldcoin is a decentralized open-source protocol built to solve two problems— income inequality and online identity authentication. 

It also identifies as a protocol to support humanity in the ever-evolving Artificial Intelligence (AI) world. With a native utility token tagged as WLD, Worldcoin had mentioned that a device called “The Orb” would ensure that users have only one Worldcoin ID. 

Curbing through the “Orb”

Altman, who is also the brain behind ChatGPT had mentioned that the project could also contribute to eliminating fraud. He also mentioned that the protocol, through “The Orb”, could help differentiate between real people and the machine language models.

Although this could mark a significant milestone in Worldcoin’s development journey, the project’s progress has not been without controversy. In May, the project raised $115 million from venture capitalists including Uniswap [UNI]-backed a16z and Blockchain capital.

However, in its tokenomics design, Worldcoin has preallocated a share of the coin’s supply to specific users. Through Orb, users would receive their allocation of WLD, the company pointed out in 2021.

While this decision did not sit well with the project’s followers, co-founder Alex Blania clarified the discourse. Blania had said, 

The more participants a network like this has, the more powerful it becomes for its uers. Giving billions of people access to one commonly owned network will lead to a major acceleration of the crypto space.

In a joint statement shared by the Worldcoin official page, co-founders Altman and Blania said users can now access the WorldApp, powered by Optimism [OP] to access their wallet.

The Worldcoin project is now live. pic.twitter.com/xZXG4w56Ps

— Worldcoin (@worldcoin) July 24, 2023

Exchanges are set for WLD

Interestingly, several cryptocurrency exchanges have started preparing to facilitate WLD deposits, signaling the token’s imminent availability for trading. 

According to Arkham Intelligence data, a certain “VestingWallet” had about 52.5% of the total Worldcoin supply. Exchanges including Bybit and OKX had also gotten a share of the overall WLD issued. 

At press time, OKX had an exchange inflow of 4 million WLD while Bybit had gotten an inflow of 3 million WLD.

Meanwhile, the world’s largest exchange Binance also announced that WLD would be available for trading starting 24 July. At the time of writing, it had already opened doors for deposits while it noted that withdrawals would begin on 25 July at 9:00 UTC.