Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, raises $115 million in Series C round for Worldcoin

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Sam Altman, founder of OpenAI, raises $115 million in Series C round for Worldcoin

Sam Altman, the founder and CEO of OpenAI, has raised $115 million in a Series C funding round for Worldcoin, a startup he co-founded with theoretical physics student Alex Blania and Max Novendstern, a former investment associate at Bridgewater Associates. Blockchain Capital led the round.

The news comes less than two years after Worldcoin emerged from stealth with $25 million in funding backed by Silicon Valley heavyweights like Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase, and billionaire LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, valuing the cryptocurrency startup at a $1 billion valuation.

The company said that it wants to distribute a crypto token to people just for being a unique individual. In a bid to raise funds for free crypto tokens, Worldcoin has faced criticism from privacy groups after it claims that it utilizes metal orb devices to scan irises to verify people's identity in exchange for free crypto tokens.

In reply to Altman's tweet introducing the project in 2021, former U.S. intelligence contractor Edward Snowden tweeted, Don t catalogue eyeballs. The cryptocurrency is a new, collectively owned global currency that will be distributed fairly to as many individuals as possible. When Worldcoin announced its idea to scan the eyes of everyone on Earth for a free cryptocurrency, we first covered it in 2021. Over 100,000 users have already signed up globally and shipped its orb-shaped devices to people in 12 countries, Worldcoin said in a statement.

By 2023, the company said it aims to hit the 1 billion user milestone. The Orb is a secure custom hardware device that gathers the image of the user's eyes to determine whether the user is actually real and whether they have claimed their free share yet.

Prospective users of the orb-shaped devices sign up by having their iris scanned, which will be operated by independent entrepreneurs worldwide. The image of the scanned eye is then converted to a numeric code, which ensures that the original image does not need to be stored or uploaded. The numeric code is not linked to the user's wallet or transactions, safeguarding user privacy.

Worldcoin said the scanned image is encrypted and later stored as a unique code, and the original scanned eye image data is deleted to protect users' privacy. Users are then then given a free share of Worldcoin's cryptocurrency. In contrast to the practices of many centralized services used by most people today, Worldcoin said no other personal information is required. Currently, no one has access to Worldcoin's source code to confirm the scanned images are indeed deleted.

We designed the whole system to be fundamentally privacy-preserving, he said. The code itself leaves the iris, the only thing left in the orb. There is no big biometric database. What raises the question - how exactly is the image meant to be used and what s in it for Worldcoin? Worldcoin said it would use cryptocurrencies to make it possible to distribute ownership and control of those networks to its users, rather than a single entity. One of the early examples of the project is a digital wallet that enables users to store their crypto and make payments. On a broader scale, Blania seeks to attract developers who can build apps on top of its system, apps that we don t see today and that are really hard to build today because very few people hold crypto. Network effects are very coveted things that are incredibly big, Blania said.

Nothing like this has ever been done before, and the outcome is uncertain, Worldcoin said in a statement. But we are obsessed with the idea that technology can let us do something collectively that even governments have not been able to: increase individual empowerment and equality of opportunity on a worldwide scale, the company said in a statement.

below is a video of CoinDesk's panel discussing Worldcoin's orb.