Proof of personhood for the AI age
HQ: San Francisco, CA, United States | Founded: 2019 | Employees: 300+ | Stage: Late Stage VC | Website: https://world.org
World is a proof-of-personhood protocol developed by Tools for Humanity, the technology company co-founded in 2019 by Sam Altman (Chairman, CEO of OpenAI), Alex Blania (CEO of Tools for Humanity) and Max Novendstern. Headquartered in San Francisco with major operations in Berlin (hardware), Erlangen and Munich, World was created to build a global, privacy-preserving identity and financial network for the age of AI. Its core primitive is World ID — a zero-knowledge credential that proves a user is a unique human without revealing underlying biometrics — issued after an iris scan by the custom-built Orb. The Orb converts an iris image into an encrypted iris code, checks uniqueness, then deletes the image by default under its SMPC/AMPC privacy architecture.
Around World ID, Tools for Humanity ships World App (self-custodial wallet for WLD and stablecoins, now with encrypted chat and payments), the WLD token (ERC-20 on Ethereum and Optimism, 10B max supply with 75% allocated to community, freely tradable since July 24, 2023), and World Chain (Ethereum L2 built on Optimism OP Stack, launched October 2024, prioritizing verified-human transactions with gas subsidies for World ID holders). The network operates in 160+ countries and surpassed 10 million verified humans in late 2024 and 25 million total World App users by early 2025. World Spaces retail verification hubs and partnerships with Optimism, Alchemy, Safe, Razer, Match Group and Visa extend distribution as World repositions from Worldcoin — a token-centric name — to World, an identity and chain infrastructure layer.
World is Sam Altman's $3B bet that proof-of-personhood becomes critical infrastructure in the AI age. Built by Tools for Humanity (San Francisco + Berlin), World pairs custom Orb iris hardware with World ID's zero-knowledge proofs to give every human a private, sybil-resistant credential, then layers World App and World Chain L2 for distribution and WLD token incentives. With 10M+ verified humans, 5k+ Orbs, and a $6B+ FDV at token launch, the open question is whether biometric identity can scale globally despite GDPR scrutiny and the Kenya suspension while converting free verification into durable network effects.
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