Sam Altman-backed digital ID project World’s WLD token jumps over 80% with Eightco treasury launch

Sam Altman's proof of humanity project World has seen its token's price surge over 80% in less than two days amid the launch of a WLD digital asset treasury.

On Monday, the Nasdaq-listed Eightco Holdings Inc. said it had launched a WLD digital asset treasury with a $250 million private placement. Hours before the announcement, WLD's price had already started rising.

WLD was changing hands at $1.87 as of 11:10 a.m. ET on early Tuesday, up over 20% on the day, according to The Block Price Page.

The token, however, has risen more than 80% since Sunday evening. WLD's all-time high of over $11 came in March 2024.

The World project has garnered significant press thanks largely to Altman, who is famously the CEO of OpenAI. The project, formerly known as Worldcoin, has been primarily developed by Tools for Humanity, a firm co-founded by Altman and Alex Blania. World gives people WLD tokens when they sign up for a World ID, which involves having a space-age looking silver orb scan individuals' eyeballs to verify they are human.

Providing a way to prove humanity and create digital identifications that people can use online is seen by many technology thought leaders as a necessary tool society will come to rely on as the number of artificial intelligence-powered actors populating the internet grows.

"When you think about these orbs, the iris scanning, in my opinion this is going to be the de facto standard when we think about separating from bots, identifying humans," Dan Ives said in a CNBC interview on Monday. Ives was announced as chairman of the board for the WLD treasury Eightco.

On Monday, Eightco, ticker symbol OCTO, said it signed a private placement for the purchase and sale of over 170 million shares of common stock for approximately $250 million, according to a statement. Eightco also issued shares to BitMine, the world's largest corporate holder of Ethereum, for another $20 million.

"The transaction was led by MOZAYYX with participation from a premier list of institutional investors including World Foundation, Discovery Capital Management, GAMA, FalconX, Kraken, Pantera, GSR, Coinfund, Occam Crest, Diametric and Brevan Howard," according to the statement.

Digital asset treasuries, or DATs, have become one of the biggest stories across crypto as token holders and investors seek to tap capital markets in order to accumulate certain digital assets.

After Eightco's shares rose over 3,000% on Monday, the company's shares were down about 18% as of 11:31 a.m. ET, according to Yahoo Finance.

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