Pantera Capital anchors World's $52.5 million WLD raise

World sold $52.5 million of its WLD token to a group of investors led by Pantera Capital. OpenAI head Sam Altman co-founded the identity verification project.

The World Foundation said Friday that no buyer is allowed to sell for a full year.

Pantera anchors a locked $52.5M WLD raise

Every buyer agreed to hold WLD for 12 months before they could touch it. The check was led by Pantera Capital. The company invests only in digital assets, and the foundation said that was the first close of the sale. It remains to be seen if there are more closes.

Bain Capital Crypto, Selini Capital, Susquehanna Crypto and Eightco Holdings also took part in the round. Eightco is the treasury company trading on Nasdaq under ticker ORBS and already owns a large slice of the WLD supply. The proceeds are transferred to the World Foundation, a guarantee foundation in the Cayman Islands created to oversee the network.

World intends to leverage the new capital to scale World ID, the system it uses to prove a person is human without revealing who they are. The target buyer covers organizations, everyday consumers and AI agents that need proof they’re run by humans.

“The need for Proof of Human is becoming acutely clear with the acceleration of AI development, and we see this in the influx of enterprise traction,” said Pantera general partner Cosmo Jiang in a statement.

World says that a reliable human check is missing, and deepfakes and synthetic identities are causing rising trouble across online dating, digital advertising, voting systems, and video calls.

The foundation said World ID 4.0 is designed for enterprise-scale integrations. Developers can use it to issue more credentials through zero-knowledge proofs. The foundation said Zoom, DocuSign, Okta, Vercel and Tinder already have World ID wired in.

WLD has seen a renewed focus this year, driven by the hype around AI. Back in mid-June, Cryptopolitan reported WLD had jumped above $0.59 as trading volume and open interest increased, with much of the liquidity flowing through South Korea’s Upbit exchange. WLD was trading around $0.34, down about 10.2% on the day, for a market cap of ~$1.29 billion.

WLD buyers get no stake, and adoption lags

The WLD sold here is “intended for use within World Network and do not represent investment interest or rights to profits or returns,” said the foundation. In layman’s terms, a spokesperson said the tokens hold no equity in Tools for Humanity. That’s the San Francisco company that makes World’s hardware and software, led by co-founder and CEO Alex Blania. Altman is also a co-founder of the company and the idea goes back to him, Blania and Max Novendstern.

The structure keeps the for-profit and nonprofit sides of the company separate. Tools for Humanity has secured ~$240 million in venture capital. The World Foundation and related entities had already pulled in $200 million through WLD sales. Including this round, the project has now raised a total of around $492.5 million.

More than 39 million people have signed up for World’s network, the company said. Over 18 million people have had the eye scan that makes a World ID. That’s done with an Orb, a metallic sphere that turns a person’s iris into a cryptographic marker.

The foundation said that since launching, users have created over 475 million verification proofs. And yet the company has struggled to get consumers to care about its mission and laid off staff in June at Tools for Humanity.

The project’s collection of biometric data has been investigated, restricted, suspended or fined by Spain, Kenya, Brazil, Indonesia, South Korea, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Scrutiny was prompted by privacy and consent concerns. World says engagement with regulators continues as it grows.

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