Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Rolls Out Orb Mini—And Finally Targets the US Market
Worldcoin—the eyeball-scanning crypto project backed by OpenAI’s Sam Altman—just dropped its sleeker, creepier Orb Mini. Now it’s setting sights on the US, because what’s a dystopian tech rollout without America’s regulatory gray zones?
The new hardware shrinks the original Orb’s iris-scanning tech into a more portable (and slightly less intimidating) package. Perfect for your local mall kiosk or dystopian pop-up event.
US launch details remain vague—no surprise for a project that’s faced bans in Spain and Kenya. But hey, when has regulatory friction ever stopped a crypto moonshot? Just ask the investors who funded this $100M ‘proof-of-personhood’ experiment.
Orbs in America
US residents can now get their irises scanned to claim some WLD tokens as part of an ongoing airdrop. Iris-scanning Orbs are being set up in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville and San Francisco to start (sorry, New Yorkers).
Those in the US who pre-registered for World have also been airdropped 150 WLD, which is about $150.
The for-profit firm Tools for Humanity is the developer of World, and the nonprofit World Foundation is behind the Worldcoin token.
TFH’s goal is to “verify” as many humans as possible and get people set up with World IDs so that humans can discern between AI or bot accounts and real human-run accounts. Users can get verified World IDs by getting their irises scanned by a metallic Orb (if this sounds dystopian to you, you’re not wrong).
The next step in this vision is the Orb Mini, revealed Wednesday night. It looks like an eyephone with Apple Vision sockets on the back, if you ask me:
Loading Tweet..The Orb Mini’s main purpose is to make scanning people’s irises easier, but at some point, it’s expected to also serve as a point-of-sale terminal.
“We tried everything not to build a hardware device,” said Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania on developing the Orb concept. He also noted the company has spent “millions” on developing the Orbs.
The Orb Mini as a point-of-sale would mean you could buy items using just your eyeballs, and the Orb would deduct the amount to be paid from your World wallet. Sounds like a Black Mirror episode — or like Amazon’s pay-with-your-palm thing.
Until that day comes, you can pay for items with a World Visa card instead that pulls directly from your World wallet.
The standard-size Orb has also been updated, which we knew about previously, and they’ve made a point of reminding us there’s an Nvidia chip in there.
Orb manufacturing is being spun up in Texas, too.
World 4.0
The World app received another big update with its 4.0 edition. Verified profile pictures and a Stripe integration are also being added.
Within the World app, there’s now a prediction markets mini-app called Kalsi available to US residents where users can make predictions with WLD. Morpho, another miniapp, enables DeFi lending for World wallet users to borrow against crypto held in that wallet (Morpho’s also available for the US).
Circle’s USDC is also being added natively to the World app, with plans for a Euro stablecoin to be added at some point.
TFH is continuing its gaming plans with a “League of Humans” tournament with gaming tech firm Razer, will put Orbs in Razer stores, and may add its “Deep Face” tech to Razer webcams for deepfake prevention and human verification.
During a press conference, the TFH team said South Korea is also a big focus for them because of the country’s strong presence in the gaming world.
World ID badges on Tinder, Hinge, and Match will be piloted in Japan to verify dating profiles in the country.
TFH says there are a total of 26 million World accounts now with 12 million verified users. Over 350 million World crypto wallet transactions have occurred in total.
Despite all this news, the WLD token price didn’t do much — it climbed from about $1.02 at the start of the live event, ROSE to $1.16, and then fell back to $1.05 by the end of the night.
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