WLD Skyrockets 31% After Worldcoin’s $135M Funding Round—Because Nothing Says ’Trust’ Like Facial Recognition Crypto
Sam Altman’s Worldcoin just bagged $135 million in fresh capital—and the market’s reacting like it’s 2021 again. WLD token holders are riding high on the hype train, with prices surging 31% post-announcement.
The AI-Crypto Crossplay
Investors keep betting that Altman’s Orwellian eyeball-scanning tech will magically merge with blockchain. Never mind that regulators still side-eye the whole operation—when has that ever stopped crypto?
A Familiar Pattern
Pump meets funding round. Token holders cheer. VCs cash out later. Rinse and repeat. At least this time they threw in some AI buzzwords to keep things spicy.
Funding to Fuel Expansion
The capital injection, disclosed in a blog post on May 21, was structured as a private token sale and will support World Network’s aggressive U.S. rollout. This includes deploying 7,500 iris-scanning Orbs across the country to reach as many as 180 million Americans by the end of the year.
“This funding opportunity is in service to the long-term mission of World and is backed by the builders who believed in World from the beginning,” the team stated.
Last month, the project launched in six cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco. Users in these locations can now receive WLD tokens in exchange for biometric verification via Orb.
The cryptocurrency grants access to several features, including token-backed loans, prediction markets, and a soon-to-be-launched Visa card for real-world spending. According to the project team, its global user base has climbed to more than 26 million, and it has already issued 12.5 million Orb-verified IDs.
Despite the momentum, World continues to face scrutiny. Privacy concerns have led to legal clashes in Germany and Brazil, while Singaporean lawmakers have raised red flags over biometric data handling and account misuse. However, the company insists scans are anonymized and deleted after verification.
The project has had mixed success recently, navigating operational suspensions in Kenya and Hong Kong, while entering a partnership with Match Group for age verification on Tinder in Japan, which observers say points to a strategic pivot toward practical use cases.
Market Dynamics
Meanwhile, a recent Tokenomist report revealed that more than 37 million WLD tokens with a market value north of $35 million were unlocked between May 5 and May 12.
The expected sell pressure from the unlocks seems not to have affected short-term price stability as much as anticipated, with WLD trading at around $1.54 at the time of writing. The current price marks a sharp 164% rebound from its all-time low recorded in early April.
Additionally, over the past week alone, the asset has jumped 31.4%, outperforming both the broader crypto market, which rose 6.5% in that period, and its smart contract platform peers, which are up just 6.8%.
