The former president of Y Combinator and the current CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman wants to scan your eye and pay you in crypto coins. If you thought NFTs were the only weird thing coming out of crypto then you were wrong. The OpenAI is reportedly working on a new cryptocurrency that will go global. But you need to get your eyeballs scanned if you want in on it.
This new startup cryptocurrency and the company behind it will be called Worldcoin. You know since it will be distributed globally. Worldcoin recently raised $25 million from various investors. The new startup is being backed by Andreessen Horowitz, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. It’s also being backed by Day One Ventures and LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, whose platform was recently hacked and data of 700 million users was leaked online.
Altman talked to the folks over at Bloomberg and said that “I’ve been very interested in things like universal basic income and what’s going to happen to global wealth redistribution and how we can do that better”. Distributing a cryptocurrency to every single person on Earth is close to an impossible task especially considering that not everyone has access to the internet.
The Universal Basic Income or UBI Altman talked about is an economic theory that basically states every adult citizen should receive a set amount of money on a regular basis. This income should be given regardless of the citizen’s needs. Altman has even previously invested $60 million in a study to test whether UBI is feasible or not. He was been making the connection between UBI and crypto for the past few years.
Worldcoin requires an eyeball scan making one aspect of the cryptocurrency physical and not completely digital. The scan is to “ensure both humanness and uniqueness of everybody signing up while maintaining their privacy and the overall transparency of a permissionless blockchain”. The device used to scan people’s irises is reportedly a “silver-colored spherical gizmo the size of a basketball”.
Worldcoin is still in its testing phase so the startup is willing to pay any volunteers for the eye scan, in cryptocurrency like bitcoin.