What Worldcoin does
Worldcoin, built by Tools for Humanity and co-founded by OpenAI's Sam Altman alongside Alex Blania, issues World ID: a proof-of-personhood credential created by scanning a person's iris with a biometric device called the Orb. The idea is to give people a way to prove they're a unique human online, without necessarily revealing who they are, as AI-generated bots and fake accounts become harder to distinguish from real users.
WLD is the ecosystem's token, distributed in part to verified users and used within the World App wallet and broader ecosystem. Tools for Humanity has since expanded into World Chain, an Optimism-stack layer-2 that gives priority and reduced fees to transactions from verified World ID holders, aiming to make the identity layer directly useful for onchain applications rather than a standalone product.
In 2025 the project rebranded from Worldcoin to World, positioning World ID and World Chain as the core products with WLD as the ecosystem's token, moving away from the Orb-and-token launch narrative that generated most of the early attention and controversy.
Risks worth knowing
The biometric data collection model has drawn regulatory pushback across multiple jurisdictions — Kenya, Spain, Portugal, Hong Kong and German privacy regulators have all raised or acted on concerns about iris-scanning and data retention, and the project has had to pause or adjust operations in several countries as a result. Paying people to scan their iris, especially in lower-income countries, has also drawn sustained ethical criticism.
Beyond privacy, there's a straightforward centralisation concern: Tools for Humanity controls the Orb hardware, the verification process and much of the software stack, which is a lot of trust to place in one company for something marketed as decentralised infrastructure. WLD's token unlock schedule has also been a persistent source of sell pressure since launch.