It’s been an enormous week for Worldcoin, the blockchain brainchild of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. The blockchain biometrics mission is closing a $100 million funding deal. The traders on this spherical embody new backers along with earlier ones.
Worldcoin’s $100 Million Seed Spherical
Previous seed spherical traders in Worldcoin embody a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), Coinbase’s enterprise capital division, Khosla Ventures, and even Sam Bankman-Fried.
(The disgraced FTX founder is at present defending towards a number of U.S. felony costs and enforcement actions.)
Fortune reports:
“The funding information is a brilliant spot in a bleak yr for crypto investments. Enterprise funding for Web3 startups plummeted from $9.1 billion within the first quarter of 2022 to $1.7 billion in 2023, an 82% year-over-year lower, based on Crunchbase.”
The ChatGPT founder’s huge fundraiser reveals there’s nonetheless monumental VC demand for investments within the crypto house. That’s regardless of the year-long crypto winter that simply could have resulted in January, a string of failed crypto corporations in latest months, and an epic regulatory battle with U.S. regulators.
Biometric Keys: Freedom or Surveillance?
Worldcoin has daring ambitions to carry biometric identification to Internet 3.0.
The OpenAI founder’s cryptocurrency mission seeks to gather and develop ID authentication assist for retina scans. VCs enthusiastic backing of the mission means they may simply have the ability to ship on such a daring plan.
However is Worldcoin extra apt to unleash the advantages of blockchain freedom or high-tech, Orwellian surveillance capitalism? For many years now, civil libertarians have thought-about the digitalization of medical data fraught with authorized and humanitarian risks.
Utilizing biometric knowledge as a safety and authentication customary could violate folks’s privateness. Worldcoin’s goal could be to create a world that ultimately calls for people surrender their biomarkers to make use of apps and do enterprise.
Though, this isn’t the inevitable final result of Worldcoin. Transferring biometric knowledge to the blockchain and utilizing Internet 3 strategies to handle non-public, personally figuring out data for Web customers is likely to be the most secure, fairest, freest technique to do it. Internet 3 can use zk-proofs and multi-party computation to maintain that knowledge non-public whereas proving to servers that request it that the person is who they are saying they’re.
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