Worldcoin was founded in 2019 by Sam Altman (CEO of OpenAI), Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern, through their company Tools for Humanity (headquartered in San Francisco and Berlin). Novendstern left the project in July 2021; Altman and Blania have led it since.
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2021–2023: a beta phase, gathering roughly 2 million users via early prototype Orb devices.
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Tools for Humanity raised $250+ million from investors including a16z, Khosla Ventures, and Reid Hoffman.
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July 24, 2023: official public launch; the token debuted at $7.50, then fell to roughly a third of that within months.
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The project's core vision is a “proof-of-personhood” system for the AI era — the spherical Orb device scans a user's iris for roughly 30 seconds, generating a unique “IrisCode” that proves they're a real, not-previously-registered human. In exchange, the user receives WLD tokens. Altman's longer-term vision also ties this to the concept of an AI-funded universal basic income (UBI).
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October 2024: the project renames itself from “Worldcoin” to simply “World” (the WLD ticker remains).
From the start, the project has faced significant regulatory pushback: Kenya suspended Orb operations in August 2023 (a court ordered the deletion of collected biometric data in May 2025); Spain*'*s data protection authority imposed a temporary ban in 2024 under GDPR; investigations have also occurred in Portugal, Hong Kong, South Korea, Indonesia, and Colombia.