OpenAI Seeks $100M in Funding for the Worldcoin Project
- Worldcoin, a project currently being developed by OpenAI, is in “advanced talks” of securing $100 million in funding.
- Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said that the funding will be sourced from a mix of “existing and new investors.”
- Worldcoin already has investors including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, and more.
- The project announced the launch of the first wallet for the Worldcoin ecosystem last Monday, May 8.
- Worldcoin was started in early 2020 under the leadership of Alex Blania, Sam Altman, and Max Novendstern.
The popularity of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT has put OpenAI, an American artificial intelligence research laboratory founded in 2015, on the forefront of the AI industry. Interestingly, the firm is currently working on Worldcoin, a project that involves the development of a cryptocurrency distributed and owned on a global scale. The first wallet for the ecosystem was released last Monday, May 8, called World App, and already has a multitude of engagements.
Meanwhile, the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, also known for co-founding Loopt, a company acquired by Green Dot Corporation in March 2012, has confirmed that his firm is in “advanced talks” of securing $100 million in funding for Worldcoin. A report from the Financial Times stated on May 15 that the $100 million will be sourced from a mix of “existing and new investors.”
The first time the concept of Worldcoin came into existence, the OpenAI project boasted a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), a venture capital firm based in Silicon Valley, US. Some other backers of the project included the Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, as well as the former CEO of bankrupt crypto exchange FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman.
It is also crucial to note that in March 2022, it was revealed in a report by The Information that OpenAI was raising $100 million from investors via a private token sale for Worldcoin while citing two people close to the developments. A more recent update claimed that the potential new funding is sizable considering the prevailing crypto winter.
“It’s a bear market, a crypto winter. It’s remarkable for a project in this space to get this amount of investment,” said the source.
It is important to mention here that the work on OpenAI’s Worldcoin was started in early 2020 under the leadership of Alex Blania, Sam Altman, and Max Novendstern. The goal of the project is to “tackle two problems” associated with the complexity of AI. Moreover, the project is also close to launching a blockchain protocol and commence recording transactions within “the next six weeks,” after having been operating in beta.
The launch of the World App was a significant step for the project. It has been described as a simple wallet that “you can use to authenticate with World ID to prove you’re a real person, get your Worldcoin tokens, and send digital money anywhere.” It is a gas-free wallet and is “focused just on simplicity,” according to executives.
Further, the Worldcoin Foundation announced its partnership with Optimism with the goal of creating a “superchain.” The Optimism mainnet will support the World ID, a “decentralized, privacy-first identity protocol.”
“With more than 1.6 million sign-ups in beta and 500,000+ monthly active World App users, the deployments on the OP Mainnet will expand access and help Worldcoin reach a values-aligned ecosystem of developers and users,” said Worldcoin in the announcement.
Many other fintech and crypto firms are working to integrate artificial intelligence into their operations. Recently, Coinbase announced that it had tested ChatGPT and concluded that the chatbot can be inconsistent, i.e., when asked the same question multiple times, different answers are given by the AI chatbot. However, it can be used to speed up manual reviews.
A crypto journalist with over 3 years of experience in DeFi, NFT, metaverse, etc. Parth has worked with major media outlets in the crypto and finance world and has gained experience and expertise in crypto culture after surviving bear and bull markets over the years.
