Key Insights
Worldcoin is back at the price of $1.85 after a year of its launch.
The WLD token has declined 95% since its ATH of $11.82 on 10 March, this year.
The top reasons for its decline include its privacy-intrusive way of establishing human identity, regulatory actions and the hype around Sam Altman's $7 trillion chip-making mega factory.
Started by Sam Altman, an AI mogul and the co-founder of OpenAI, Worldcoin (WLD) was once touted as the leader of AI and big data cryptocurrencies.
Worldcoin has now crashed beyond all recovery levels. The crypto project once aimed to create a human-verifiable digital presence. As recently as March 2024, it reached an all-time high of $11.84, pumped by Altman’s announcement of creating a chip manufacturer company.
However, Worldcoin soon ran into trouble. Led by its controversial method of establishing human identity via iris scans, the project was in the middle of several investigations.
Even after the project claimed to allow users to delete all the collected biometric data, it has been in constant decline. Also, as all the factors pumping the coin vanished, the buyers dumped it, and its price crashed to $1.85 (at press time).
This article will explore the reasons for Worldcoin's 95% decline and explain how others survived.
Worldcoin was launched on 24th July 2023 after two years of development. The cryptocurrency soon debuted on almost all major exchanges and cryptocurrency listing platforms.
However, as soon as it was launched, the cryptocurrency ran into trouble. Several countries, such as Nigeria, Germany, India, the UK, and France, opened investigations into its protocol, asking users to scan their iris using the "Orb."
Though there were some incentives like free WLD tokens, the iris scanning method of proving “human-hood” was received with much less fanfare.
The controversy led Worldcoin to touch a low of $1.01 on 14 September 2023.
However, the cryptocurrency soon turned bullish. By 25 Feburary 2024, due to the general bullishness in crypto markets, the approval of Bitcoin ETFs, the memecoin and the AI rally, the project touched a high of $9.12.
This was also when Sam Altman announced his new venture, aiming to raise $7 trillion for a semiconductor fabrication plant rivaling those of NVIDIA and Intel.
The project was naturally well received because cutting-edge Artificial Intelligence depends entirely on high-performance semiconductor chips.
Since Altman already had experience building the biggest LLM model till date, i.e., ChatGPT, expanding his business to semiconductor chips was seen as a natural expansion.
As a result, WLD made its all-time high of $11.82 on 10 March 2024.
Though the project was ambitious, it still needed to raise the amount. As Altman failed to raise the amount, the euphoria soon faded.
By 8 June 2024, Worldcoin was again back to $1.9, after 11 months from where it had started its journey.
The Worldcoin project almost failed for several reasons. First, it ran into privacy concerns and investigations when it was launched. Second, the AI hype around cryptocurrencies was meant to fail because there was almost no connection between top AI companies and AI cryptocurrencies.
Worldcoin uses a digital signature to identify and establish the identity of humans on its blockchain. To make the digital signature unique, it was generated from people’s iris scans, which are unique to everyone. These iris scans were collected using a device called an Orb.
However, since the usage of biometric data worldwide is very strictly regulated, the usage of iris scans generated a lot of objections.
The first authorities to initiate an investigation were the Bavarian State Office for Data Protection and Supervision in Germany. Soon, more investigations opened up in France, Kenya, Portugal, Hong Kong, and India.
Much of the rally in Worldcoin started from Sam Altman’s chip-making project. Sam sought to raise $7 trillion in investment for the project. The news spread like wildfire, and soon, Worldcoin rallied from $2.35 on 8th Feburary 2024 to $11.82 a month later on 10 March 2024, a rally of 502%.
The rally ended like a pump-and-dump scheme, with Worldcoin crashing down to $1.85 (at press time) on 8th July 2024, within 11 months of listing.
No, despite the 95% price crash, Worldcoin is still an active project.
Recently, the project announced that it has allowed users to delete their iris scans and may proceed with a less-intrusive identity method.
Also, as per available on-chain data, in April 2024, Worldcoin had 10 million users, of which 2 million were daily active users. In the last 15 days, its users have increased by 24.5k despite the recent market crash.