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World is the one crypto project that you either love or hate.
Since launch, the Sam Altman-backed World (previously Worldcoin) has been roundly criticized for its “low float” tokenomics and faced scrutiny from regulators stemming from data privacy concerns.
Yet, World continues to stand out in the industry for trying to do something uniquely innovative.
Despite the WLD token’s 88% slump from its 2024 highs, the team announced last week an undiscounted sale of $135 million in WLD to Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital Crypto. Mirana Ventures and Selini Capital also participated in the sale, the latter of which claimed that it “wrote its (by far) largest-ever check.”
Which made me question: What do some of the world’s top institutional investors see in a project almost universally vilified by Crypto Twitter?
World ID
At the heart of World’s business model is the distribution involved with World ID, the team’s open-source digital identity product.
Why sign up? In exchange for registering their biometric data at an Orb (World’s signature iris-scanning device), users are offered WLD token incentives.
It’s (almost) as simple as that.
To date, 12.6 million unique humans have Orbed. To put World’s distribution into rough perspective, Coinbase has something like 10 million monthly active users, while Telegram has a billion (note these aren’t quite apple-to-apple comparisons).
World App and World Chain
World’s distributional funnel has helped fuel about 27 million users to onboard its World App, an ecosystem hub of hundreds of “miniapps” ranging from DeFi (Morpho), lottery games (PoolTogether), messaging, minigames like Wordle, payments, etc.
Miniapps are deployed on World Chain, the team’s Ethereum L2 built on the Optimism stack. The chain has seen some growth lately.
What makes World Chain different is how the chain’s execution layer ties in with World ID.
For instance, users with a verified World ID can receive priority transaction inclusion over arbitrage bots on World Chain, or what the team calls “Priority Blockspace for Humans.” The team also codifies rules that redirect transaction fees from bots to subsidize gas costs of World ID users onchain.
World Chain isn’t all that interested in competing with dominant chains though, as Liam Horne, Optimism co-founder and advisor to World, told me.
What World wants to do is “to own the end-to-end user experience and ultimately the distribution of millions of people with World ID and World App,” Horne said.
“Our framing is not ‘Check out this app built on World Chain.’ Instead, it is ‘Tap into the millions of World ID users that want to use digital assets for their day-to-day financial and consumer needs.’”
It all hinges on World ID adoption. The north star is to build a “human hub,” and World is leveraging the tool of token incentives to do so.
World’s business model
World ID is freely available for other teams to leverage today, though monetization will kick in later.
Today, World ID is integrated on World Chain, Ethereum, Optimism and even Solana (via Wormhole).
Governments, Web3 companies (DSCVR, Galxe) and traditional companies like Razer, Match Group and Shopify have also integrated World ID to better their services.
These companies have business models that are negatively impacted by bots. World ID represents the solution for them to curb this value leakage.
Match Group for instance, will probably give World ID-verified Tinder users some kind of checkmark or user privilege, which in turn improves the overall user experience (and spurs more users to seek out an Orb).
Or to use a more crypto-native example, dapps can better tune their growth campaigns to target real users with points/airdrop rewards. An uncollateralized lending product, for instance, could more efficiently reward real human users, making the multi-wallet practice of airdrop farming obsolete.
World eventually plans to charge fees to apps for using World ID (full details out by Q3 2025).
That’s where the consistent demand sink for WLD token comes in — institutions paying to use World ID, instead of speculative interest from retail.
