Scan Your Eyeballs and Get Paid? Sam Altman’s World Project Launches with Visa Card

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Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a 21st-century spectacle that makes the Jetsons look like Luddites and the DMV seem charmingly low-tech. Yes, Sam Altman—OpenAI’s resident wizard and a man who presumably collects privacy disclaimers like other people collect speeding tickets—has unleashed the World project upon an unsuspecting America, and it’s every bit as quirky as you’d expect. All you need to do is scan your eyeballs. No, really. 👀

On April 30, after what one can only assume was an epic round of hand-wringing and nervous laughter, the World project made its official U.S. debut. But in classic high-tech fashion, it’s rolling out not everywhere, but in six cities thoughtfully selected for having both hipster cred and large numbers of vision insurance providers: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and, naturally, San Francisco.

Here’s how it works. Download the World App—possibly the only time in your life you’ll actively want to be on a mailing list—hand over your identity (not metaphorically, but literally: get your iris scanned at a gigantic device called, with astonishing lack of irony, “the Orb”), and collect your shiny WLD tokens. If you thought Willy Wonka’s Golden Tickets were invasive, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Even NVIDIA got on board, powering the Orbs. You can even pop into a Razer store, so if you want to combine your love of RGB keyboards with casual biometric verification, now’s your chance. 🎮

World is live in the USA. Verify your World ID in six key cities now.

— World (@worldcoin) May 1, 2025

Now, of course, when you start talking about high-tech orbs harvesting biometric data in malls, people raise eyebrows (presumably after checking that their brows haven’t already been scanned). World faced more backlash than a Wi-Fi-less Starbucks. Countries like Brazil and Hong Kong wanted to know why your face and eyeball were being stashed away, possibly next to a vintage MySpace password database.

So, in a plot twist worthy of a soap opera, the project now lets you permanently delete your magic iris code, effectively “un-verifying” yourself and sending your digital twin into exile. Truly, soul-searching has never been so literal.

But wait—there’s more! The company promises you’ll have “complete control” over your digital identity (where “complete control” means trusting cryptographic jargon like “Anonymized Multi-Party Computation” and “zero-knowledge proofs”). In short: trust us, we’re scientists! 🔬 As the announcement puts it, your personal data lives only on your device, not on an ominous server, nor a poorly secured third-party database. Allegedly.

For those who like to be compensated for their existential anxiety, good news: a debit card powered by Visa is on the way. Spend your WLD tokens wherever Visa is accepted—which, judging by my wallet, is everywhere from gas stations to that one haunted pizza parlor downtown. Merchants will get good old-fashioned fiat currency so no one has to explain “gas fees” to a nail salon manager ever again.

Once public, verified users (presumably with both eyes still attached) will receive a card neatly linked to their unique World ID. Would Orwell have approved? Debatable. Would he have at least admired the efficiency? Probably.

Financial update, for the five readers who track prices before breakfast: WLD dropped 2.33% in the last 24 hours, now sitting at $1.05—although it did hit a high of $1.17 for those playing the crypto rollercoaster. The market cap’s nearly $1.4 billion, trading at a not-totally-insignificant $465 million daily volume, and up 23.59% this week, because apparently, nothing says ‘trust’ like a freshly-boiled eyeball.

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2025-05-01 11:33