Worldcoin: Buy, Sell, or Hold in 2026?

Worldcoin (CRYPTO: WLD) is a bet that the internet will soon need a service that provides proof-of-personhood (PoP), which is to say, it's a bet that bots and AI agents are going to continue to be a scourge on the internet to the point where sites and businesses are going to want to pay to avoid having to deal with them. PoP is a way to prove that a website's user is actually a unique human rather than a robot.

But does that really make Worldcoin an asset worth buying or continuing to hold, or is it better to avoid it?

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The buy case is pretty speculative

As you may have heard from the hubbub surrounding the coin's debut a few years ago, Worldcoin uses hardware devices called Orbs, which scan a person's iris and thereby facilitate the creation of a unique credential proving the user's humanness.

The investment thesis for buying this asset is that proving your humanness could become as common as logging into a website using a password, causing developers to integrate PoP because it's the most reliable method for identity verification. In turn, whenever a site or service verifies your identity using Worldcoin's platform, they'll need to pay a small amount of the coin, and some of it may be burned or retained by the protocol itself at the same time.

So in theory, they'll need to buy and hold some of it to do that, which creates a floor for the asset's price and which could eventually force it upward if enough sites implement its tech.

For existing holders, continuing to hold the coin is the best move if they like the core idea and think that proving humanness is going to be something more important in the near future. Buying it now, before that process plays out, would mean getting the largest returns if it moves up.

The case for avoiding it

But for most investors right now, even if they have a high risk tolerance, it's probably best to avoid Worldcoin on account of its very difficult adoption path -- it's simply a big ask for people to get their eyes scanned for a nonmedical reason just to be onboarded to a cryptocurrency -- as well as the risks posed by regulators.

On that note, Spain's data protection authority ordered a halt to Worldcoin's data collection and processing in March 2024. Plus, Hong Kong's privacy regulator ordered Worldcoin to stop operating there in May 2024, and other jurisdictions have taken similar moves.

So, until the project can make itself more palatable to regulators, as well as less intimidating to potential users, it's far too risky to invest in. And that's before even getting into the issues inherent to its tokenomics, as the fact that it's a volatile cryptocurrency is something that probably detracts from businesses being willing to buy and hold it for the sake of using it to verify identities.

Alex Carchidi has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.