Crypto
Sam Altman closeup
Look deep into Sam Altman’s eyes (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Sam Altman wants to scan your eyeballs in exchange for crypto... and then make your dating life easier

Welcome to the future!

If you’re willing to have your eyeballs scanned, you will be handsomely (OK, maybe not that handsomely) rewarded with crypto, thanks to OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. 

Starting this week, Altman’s blockchain project World, part of the Tools of Humanity startup, will enable Americans to have their eyes scanned using “signature NVIDIA-powered Orbs” in Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco.

To date, more than 12 million people have an Orb-verified World ID, which the company says allows you to “anonymously and securely verify that you are a real and unique human (and not a bot) for easy online verification, such as signing into social apps and ensuring fair online activities like voting or buying concert tickets.”

Altman’s company also plans to deploy 7,500 Orbs nationwide within the next 12 to 24 months.

In addition, Americans will now have access to “the complete World App experience, and claim the Worldcoin (WLD) airdrop,” according to a press release.

Once your eyes are scanned, you will receive 16 WLD, while early adopters who downloaded the World app will receive a “Pioneer Grant” of 150 WLD. (But not if you’re a New York resident!) WLD was up 2% this morning, but has fallen a whopping 90% since its all-time-high on March 10, 2024.

World also announced a World Card, in partnership with Visa, which enables WLD to be used across 150 million merchants worldwide.

“Merchants can seamlessly receive fiat currency without needing to understand crypto, while individuals can gain flexibility in how to use their digital assets. There’s no need to convert or transfer rewards — the card is expected to make rewards spendable with a seamless crypto-to-fiat usability,” according to the company.

Last, but not least, World also announced a partnership with dating site Match which will “pilot using World ID as a simple and secure solution for age verification, beginning with Tinder users in Japan.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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