Sam Altman’s Worldcoin token sky rockets on day one of trading

Co-founded by by OpenAI Chief Executive Officer Sam Altman, the token of the crypto project Worldcoin, took off and sky rocketed on its first day of trading on Monday as investors piled into the hype around artificial intelligence.

Data compiled by CoinMarketCap data revealed that Worldcoin hiked as high as $3.58 from the initial price of $1.70 before falling back to $2.52 as of 11:12 a.m. in London. By that time, around $145 million worth of the token had been traded, after exchanges like Binance listed it.

Altman’s eyeball-scanning crypto project officially went live on Monday and it uses  a small device called an “orb”, which is able to scan people’s eyeballs in order to generate a unique digital identity. That identity, or World ID, allows its holder “proof of personhood” in the Worldcoin parlance.

The initial supply of the coin is currently capped at 10 billion tokens, according to the project’s white paper. Monday’s launch consisted of 143 million Worldcoins, of which 100 million were loaned to market makers and the remainder allocated to investors who verified with the project’s Orb technology in the pre-launch phase.

Worldcoin will not be available for trading in the United States due to regulatory restrictions there.