Worldcoin was founded by Sam Altman, Alex Blania, and Max Novendstern (Max Novendstern left the project in July 2021). The most well-known of the co-founders, Sam Altman, is also the co-founder and current CEO of OpenAI and former president of Y Combinator, a startup incubator. Initial research and development for the Worldcoin project was conducted by Tools for Humanity (TFH) and other partners.

Worldcoin has raised over 250M USD across several funding rounds from investors such as a16z, Khosla Ventures, Bain Capital Crypto, Blockchain Capital, and Tiger Global, among others.

Worldcoin aims to build the world's largest identity and financial network, achieving truly global adoption at a billion-people scale. In contrast to most other crypto projects, the majority of the WLD tokens will be given to individuals - simply for being human.

Using World ID, individuals will be able to prove that they are a real, unique human to any platform that integrates with the protocol, including to web3 systems, social networking sites, and governmental programs. This will enable fair airdrops or token/NFT sales, provide protection against bots/sybil attacks on social media, and enable the fairer distribution of limited governmental resources. Furthermore, World ID can also enable global democratic processes and novel forms of governance (e.g., via quadratic voting), and it may eventually support a path to AI-funded UBI.

Over two million people from more than 30 different countries across five continents have verified at an Orb during the pre-launch phase, which lasted from May 2021 untill July 2023. At launch, Worldcoin begins the rollout of 1,500 Orbs across 35+ cities in 20+ countries to meet the global demand for World ID.

The initial total supply of Worldcoin is 10 billion WLD.

For 15 years following launch, the supply cap is fixed to 10B WLD (enforced by the WLD smart contract). After 15 years, governance may decide to implement an inflation rate of up to 1.5% per year if it deems necessary for the long-term sustainability of the protocol. Governance will also decide how to allocate these newly minted tokens (if any). The inflation cap of 1.5% per year is enforced by the WLD smart contract. Per default, unless changed via governance, the inflation rate is set to 0%.

The 10B WLD tokens are allocated to different stakeholders as follows:

• 75% of the WLD tokens are allocated to the Worldcoin community.
• 9.8% of the WLD tokens are allocated to the Initial Development Team.
• 13.5% of the WLD tokens are allocated to TFH Investors.
• 1.7% of the WLD tokens are allocated to the TFH Reserve.

The Worldcoin Foundation has formulated an aspirational token allocation goal, aiming to allocate at least 60% of all WLD tokens (coming from the Worldcoin Community pool) to individuals in the form of user grants. See the Worldcoin Tokenomics section of the project's whitepaper for details.

For live on-chain data about WLD, see this Dune dashboard.

For more information about World ID, the Orb, and the Worldcoin protocol, please see the Worldcoin Whitepaper. (version July 24, 2023).

For more information about Worldcoin's tokenomics, please see the Worldcoin Tokenomics section of the project's whitepaper.