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Controversial crypto project Worldcoin sees hope of revival after crashing more than 95%.
The project has seen new adoption in Malaysia, Austria, and the Dominican Republic.
However, its tokenomics remains a large threat to investor wealth allowing people to call it a pump-and-dump scheme.
Worldcoin is about to launch its own layer-2 blockchain, named World Chain, that will support and streamline its operations more efficiently. However, no date has yet been declared on when it might launch this Layer-2 chain.
The World Chain is designed to be a gasless blockchain with Worldcoin taking care of all the transaction fees on it. Users would be able to do routine transactions on its chain with zero fees. Likely, the chain will not work as other L2s because of this feature.
In June 2024, Worldcoin was reported to have hired two former executives each from Google and Twitter (now X.com). Adrian Ludwig and Ajay Patel were hired by Google as Chief Information Officer and head of World ID respectively. Damien Kieran who was an ex-Twitter employee was hired as the Chief Privacy Officer. His hiring was seen to be in connection with the past allegations on Worldcoin regarding privacy.
The executives hired by Tools For Humanity, a contributor to the Worldcoin project.
Amid several new adoptions, Worldcoin has seen rising institutional interest in its identity solution.
In August this year, MIMOS Berhad, a government research center in Malaysia has signed an MoU with Worldcoin to create human-verified IDs for its members.
The MoU also has clauses to jointly manufacture Orbs for the common use of both Worldcoin and MIMOS.
The platform has started rolling out to new countries after a period of turbulence where it was investigated in multiple nations including India, Germany, Spain, Portugal, France, and Kenya.
The latest launch has happened in the Dominican Republic.
Worldcoin operates in 41 countries around the world with over 3800 Orb locations. Orbs are eye-scanning devices that are used to generate a user's World ID. This helps them establish their human-verified identity in Worldcoin.
In July 2024, Worldcoin entered Austria, giving it access to central Europe on a limited basis. This was the first major ingress in Europe after the project suffered a humiliating investigation.
Worldcoin currently claims to have a little over 6.8 million verified users and 255k daily transactions. In the last seven days, the project had gained 200k new users.
Further in the last one and a half year, Worldcoin has crossed over 146 million wallet transactions.
What works against Worldcoin is its skewed tokenomics. The project has 10 billion total token supply out of which only 5% is currently in active circulation.
Even though, we consider the fact that the project allocated 75% of total supply for the community, still a large part of the supply (25%) lies with internal team, investors, and early backers. Now, when this supply enters the markets, it is likely that the token value will plummet even lower.
Recently, one such incident came into the limelight as former FTX and Alameda executives tried to withdraw their WLD holdings. It has been reported that Sam Bankman-Fried, Caroline Ellison, and other associates own around $48 million worth of WLD which even by conservative estimates stand at 25 million tokens or 5% of the current supply.
At a stage, when the WLD has barely started recovering from its low levels, this new supply could disrupt the entire recovery.
Worldcoin presents itself as a very odd project with an utopian solution, skewed tokenomics and a protocol that allegedly poses risks to user biometric data. These issues prompted people to even allege that the project was indeed an elaborate pump-and-dump scheme.
However, the solution could revolutionize the way modern social media networks work and counter the automated bots that seek to manipulate our behavior on such platforms.
If the project had better tokenomics and did away with some of its controversial operations, it would have gotten a much larger response from the crypto community.
Despite all, the project has now seen a revival and if it works the way it claims, Worldcoin might become a major crypto project in the future.
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