Sam Altman’s Worldcoin rebrands and launches a fresh “orb”

World wants you to forget about that whole coin thing.

The company formerly known as Worldcoin has rebranded, chopping the “coin” from its name and doubling down on its stated goal of providing “proof of human verifications.” In addition to the name change, on Thursday World announced an updated version of its iris-scanning orb device that — if you believe the company — will help humans distinguish themselves from AI. The post lauded the technology within the Orb, noting it’s “equipped with the most advanced NVIDIA Jetson module with nearly 5x the AI performance over the previous version.”

In 2021, World cofounder Sam Altman told Bloomberg that the project was intended to help distribute a cryptocurrency. And World did launch a token, WLD, in 2023. At the time, the project’s tokenomics were criticized as allocating too large of a percentage of WLD tokens to World insiders.

World also unveiled a new tool, World ID Deep Face. The company said Deep Face will work to verify that the person on the other end of a video call isn’t a digital fake, something that’s an increasing concern as GenAI models like Sora rapidly improve and are able to create convincing deepfakes of people.

As of Friday morning, the WLD token was priced at $2.18 — down more than 80% from it’s all-time high of $11.82 in March.