I posted a thread on X about a month ago laying out why I think the market has World (formerly Worldcoin) wrong. At the time WLD was trading around $0.25, down from nearly $10 at its 2024 peak. It’s up roughly 32% since then, but that barely registers against the size of the opportunity I see here. The more I use AI day-to-day (in my work at AI-first Helixion Therapeutics, in research, or in just navigating the internet), the more obvious it becomes that what World is building will be needed by everyone, and sooner than most people realise.
Let me clear, this isn’t a shill for a crypto token. I own a small amount of WLD, genuinely insignificant in the context of my portfolio. I’m writing about it because I think it’s one of the more misunderstood projects in crypto right now.
The problem nobody has solved yet
Sam Altman put it pretty direct in a recent conversation with Cosmo Jiang from Pantera Capital: AI has advanced faster than even the people building it expected. We’re rapidly heading into a world where AI-generated content outpaces human output, where you can no longer trust that the person on the other end of a video call, a dating app, or a customer service chat is actually a person.
Spend a few minutes on X and you already see what this looks like. Bot armies and AI-generated images passed off as real photos are everywhere. And we’re just at the very start of this curve!
The solution has to be a way to prove you’re human. This has to be done cryptographically without giving up your privacy in the process, and that is exactly what World ID is.
The iris scan
The iris scan that set World apart is where most people get stuck, and I understand why. Walking up to an Orb to have your eyes scanned sounds scary or even dangerous, if you don’t know what’s happening underneath. I did it myself almost 3 years ago, and did a lot of research before doing the scan.
What happens is that the iris is used to generate a one-way cryptographic hash. The hash proves you are a unique human without storing identifiable biometric data anywhere. You can then prove you’re a real person to any service that integrates World ID without revealing who you are. It’s privacy-preserving in a way that traditional ID systems simply can’t match, and a lot more privacy-preserving than handing over your passport to yet another centralised database.
If you do the deeper dive, the iris concern is largely a non-issue, but it is clearly part of why the market is discounting this so heavily.
The first use cases are already live
What surprised me when I dug in is how much is already happening, the public partnerships alone are quite big. Tinder started to use World ID to fight bots pretending to be humans, Zoom is integrating it for verified human meetings, and the governments of Taiwan and Malaysia are exploring it for citizen services
But the bigger picture Pantera laid out in a YouTube video goes far beyond these integrations:
Digital advertising is roughly a half-trillion-dollar industry. Advertisers don’t want to pay for bot impressions, and that problem is about to get exponentially worse. Capture even 5–10% of that industry through verified-human impressions and you have a major business on its own.
Government services like social security distribution, voting, or welfare. The fraud savings alone are enormous, and governments are actively looking for solutions here.
Agentic commerce is the one with the biggest potential. As AI agents start doing real economic activity on our behalf (things like booking travel, making purchases, executing trades), every transaction will likely need a human in the loop somewhere for accountability and trust. I think World ID is the natural solution for that.
Credential storing Less important for now, but a huge opportunity in the longer run. Once you’ve proved you’re a unique human, you can append verified credentials on top: driver’s license, education, employment history. It becomes the base layer for digital identity.
The math
Pantera’s thesis is that if World captures a meaningful share of these markets at $5–10 of revenue per user per year, this becomes a $50 billion free cash flow protocol. There are roughly 4 billion smartphone users globally, that’s the addressable population, and the infrastructure is being designed to scale to that level.
Now apply the token math. Fully diluted, with every future unlock through 2032 priced in, there will be a maximum of 10 billion WLD tokens. Mature, successful tech companies trade at 25× free cash flow or higher. Apply that to $50 billion FCF and you get a $1.25 trillion market cap, which works out to roughly $125 per token on a fully diluted basis.
WLD is sitting around $0.34 today. Even with all the dilution baked in, the math points to something like a 300–400× return over the next several years if the business model works. That’s maybe not Bitcoin-in-2013 territory, but it isn’t far off, and the comparison feels appropriate to me. Investing now in World means you are early, just like BTC in 2013. Investing now is far outside the consensus, far outside the Overton window, just like BTC 13 years ago. And the use cases for World are not obvious until you think about it for a while, just like with BTC.
The OpenAI IPO
The near-term catalyst I’m watching is the planned OpenAI IPO, because Sam Altman is (deeply) involved in both companies. When OpenAI goes public, World could benefit as well. Retail investors who discover OpenAI through its listing are going to find World as “the other thing Sam built.”.
The fact that Elon lost his court case again OpenAI (mostly because he filed too late), was a good thing not only for OpenAI but indirectly also for World.
The risks are quite big though
A couple of things about the risks, because there are some real risks here. First of all the dilution schedule is heavy and runs through 2032. Dilution gets reduced in July this year, but if token usage doesn’t go up significantly this could keep pushing the price down. Next to that, the regulatory environments are still figuring out biometric ID, and at least some jurisdictions will push back. They simply don’t understand it, just like many still don’t understand Bitcoin (I always see that as an opportunity). It also means that adoption could be much slower, or that adoption would stop. There is a lot of execution risk between here and a half-trillion-dollar revenue base. But I feel that once adoption goes up most of the execution risk will be less important.
Finally, Sam Altman can be a risk. He has become a very controversial figure over the past years, and although his involvement helped World a lot, it could also become a problem. Hard to judge how this will develop, but keep it in mind.
None of this is financial advice, just my personal opinion, and my opinion is often very different from mainstream investors. I have been wrong on many crypto bets and I’ll be wrong on plenty more. But when I look at where AI is heading, and at what is needed to keep the internet usable for humans, World is the best answer I have seen so far.