Sam Altman’s All-Seeing Orb: Scan Your Eyes, Get Crypto—What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

by

There are days when a man walks the wide country of the internet and thinks he’s seen oddity in its finest hour, but then OpenAI’s Sam Altman wakes up and says, “Hold my Orb.” His new brainchild, a project renamed World (it used to be Worldcoin until folks realized coins don’t usually stare back at you), drifted into the United States like a slick salesman with a suitcase full of something you probably didn’t want but suddenly can’t resist.

“Innovation hubs”—that’s what the project calls Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville and San Francisco. Maybe there’s something in the water in those cities. Or maybe there isn’t enough, we’ll never know. Either way, that’s where folks will find themselves approached by a shiny, spherical contraption called The Orb—a device that’ll look deep into your eyes (and probably your soul, if you forgot your sunglasses), all in exchange for the digital trinket known as Worldcoin, or WLD. 😳

Now, the premise is simple, as the best and wildest schemes often are: you get your face and eyes scanned by the Orb, and in return, you receive a World ID as proof you haven’t been replaced by a robot… yet. That ID lets you log into everything from Minecraft to Discord, and, if you’re feeling particularly modern, Shopify—because what’s a little biometric data between friends?

And wait, there’s more. At a shindig in San Francisco, the company announced it’s cooking up a partnership with Visa, engineering something called the “World Visa card.” The catch? You gotta scan those retinas first. Swipe right on a crypto payment, but first—look deep into the eye of the Orb. 👁️

Matchmaking with verified ID

This is where it gets spicy. Match Group—the love brokers of Tinder, Hinge, Match.com, and Plenty of Fish—put their lonesome hats in the ring and started testing World ID. Now, instead of worrying whether your date is catfishing you, you only have to worry if they’ve recently locked eyes with a million-dollar disco ball. “Only real humans allowed,” they say. Somewhere, a bot swipes left, in anguish.

World’s been flirting with other partners, too. There’s Kalshi, a prediction market wannabe, and Morpho, a lending platform so decentralized you could mistake it for your feelings on a Monday morning.

This all started back in 2019, when Altman’s grand idea was to build a global identity system so bulletproof even a stubborn bot couldn’t sneak through. (It rebranded to World in 2024, perhaps because scanning eyeballs sounds less weird than scanning coins.) As of now, there are 26 million folks worldwide in the club—12 million of them staring right into the Orb, unblinking, hoping one day this’ll be worth it. 🤷

WLD had its moment of glory, leaping up by 15% on the news. Then, like a coyote who got a whiff of something funny, it dashed the other way, losing those gains plus five percent for good measure. At time of writing, WLD is barely worth more than the morning coffee you’ll need after questioning your life decisions. The coin’s 90% down from its glory days, so if you’re hoping to cash out, better hope you’re not also paying for the therapy bill.

Read More

2025-05-01 09:17