UBI Could Be the World’s Next Killer Consumer App — If the Price is Right

Universal Basic Income (UBI) is poised to disrupt finance—if it can survive its own economics.

The UBI Gamble: Adoption vs. Affordability

Silicon Valley’s favorite pet project now faces its make-or-break moment. The tech’s ready. The politics? Maybe. But the real hurdle? Making the numbers work for Main Street.

Why Wall Street Hates This Conversation

Traditional banks see UBI apps as existential threats—no overdraft fees, no credit checks, just direct cash flow. No wonder lobbyists are flooding Capitol Hill with ‘concerns’ about ‘consumer protection.’

The Crypto Connection

Blockchain-native UBI experiments are already bypassing legacy systems. Ethereum-based pilots in Portugal show 78% faster distribution than government programs. But volatility? Still a nightmare for budgeting.

The Bottom Line

UBI could be the app that finally kills your bank account—if it doesn’t choke on its own tokenomics first. (And if it succeeds? Watch bankers suddenly ‘disrupt themselves’ with 200% markup ‘UBI+’ premium accounts.)

But the price of WLD has reached as high as nearly $12. So, if we value the grants at the approximate time of distribution — accounting for users potentially dumping their tokens as soon as they receive them — the total value of WLD grant distributions moons to $1.61 billion.

On average, each user has received around 50 WLD as part of the grants program, worth only about $50 right now but closer to $600 at all-time highs. And it’s likely the real value that recipients unlocked sits somewhere in the middle-to-low end of that scale.

That’s obviously lower than the $1,000 per month paid out in Altman’s previous real-world UBI trial, so the effectiveness of World’s quasi-UBI scheme is questionable at best. But when it comes to World, its grants program might be the closest thing it has to a killer app, at least at the consumer level, with integrations with platforms, businesses and so on rounding out the rest of its potential.

Awkwardly, this WOULD place tokenomics at the vanguard of humanity’s last line of defense for the AI takeover, which by the way things are going, sounds just about right to me.

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