Original Author: Ma He, Foresight News
On March 28, the World Foundation announced the completion of an OTC sale of WLD tokens totaling $65 million, with an average transaction price of $0.2719. The deal involved four counterparties, with the first settlement completed on March 20, 2026. Among these, $25 million worth of WLD tokens are subject to a 6-month lock-up period. The official statement indicated that the proceeds will be directly used for the project's core operations, R&D investments, Orb hardware manufacturing, and ecosystem development. All settlements were executed through the multi-signature address 0xE797 of World Assets.
In the current deep bear market environment, completing a token transaction of tens of millions of dollars is quite rare. The last major token sale by the World Foundation dates back to May 2025, when its subsidiary World Assets sold $135 million worth of WLD tokens to early supporters a16z and Bain Capital Crypto at market prices.
Looking back at WLD's complete price trajectory in this cycle, it serves as a textbook case from frenzy to reality. In July 2023, Worldcoin (now renamed World) officially launched WLD. Backed by Sam Altman's personal endorsement, the AI boom, and the unique narrative of "Proof of Human Uniqueness," it quickly became a market focus.
In March 2024, driven by the Bitcoin halving cycle and resonance with AI concepts, the price of WLD surged within a single month, reaching an all-time high of approximately $11.8. Its market capitalization once approached $10 billion. That year, global users showed unprecedented enthusiasm for registering World IDs through Orb iris scanning, and the project was regarded as the top contender for Web3 identity infrastructure.
However, after the peak, it soon fell into silence. In the second half of 2024, with the overall crypto market correction, strict scrutiny from regulatory bodies like the EU on biometric data, and the emergence of the project's own large-scale unlocking pressure, the price of WLD began to plummet.
Throughout 2025, the price of WLD fluctuated repeatedly in the range of $0.5 to $1.5. Although the adoption rate of iris scanning steadily advanced, it fell far short of early expectations, and user growth significantly decoupled from narrative hype. Entering 2026, WLD continued to bottom out, recently touching a new low of $0.2433 and currently hovering around $0.27, representing a cumulative drop of over 97% from its ATH.
In this cycle, the price movement of WLD resembles the trilogy of most altcoins: concept-driven → supply pressure → real-world test. Early premiums were mainly driven by the Altman IP and the AI trend, while later stages were suppressed by continuous unlocking and macro tightening.
Interestingly, just before announcing the large OTC sale, on March 25, World's official website published a research report titled "Private Proof of Human: Critical Infrastructure for Humanity in a World with Advanced AI." The article directly addresses the core pain point of the AI agent era: how to establish a reliable and privacy-preserving "Proof of Human" infrastructure in a digital world flooded by machines.
The paper elaborates on the technical solution combining Orb iris scanning hardware with Secure Multi-Party Computation (SMPC) and Zero-Knowledge Proofs (ZKP). This approach can efficiently verify human uniqueness while completely avoiding the leakage of personal biometric data, offering more foresight and security compared to traditional facial recognition or passport verification. This solution is positioned as the future foundation of internet trust, effectively countering deepfakes and AI bot attacks.
On March 26, Marc Andreessen, co-founder of a16z, shared this paper on platform X with a brief yet weighty comment: Time to prove human.
In the current era where AI is reshaping productivity, PoH will become a necessity to distinguish humans from machines and rebuild the trust layer of the digital economy.
On March 17, World launched AgentKit. Its working principle involves Agents completing registration via World ID proof, linking a wallet to an anonymous human identity. The agent signs a standard identity verification challenge at a protected endpoint, and the agent's signature is matched with its associated human identity. Access is granted upon a successful match. The official application scenarios state that AgentKit agents can also be used for privacy protection, ticketing systems, access frequency limiting, and preventing Sybil attacks.
On April 17, World will host the "Lift Off" World ID global launch event in San Francisco, with Sam Altman personally attending and co-hosting alongside World CEO Alex.
The event will focus on the latest developments of World ID, Orb hardware iterations, and application scenarios for human verification in the AI era. Altman's presence itself symbolizes top-tier influence and confidence and may signal potential synergy between OpenAI and World—AI agents need authentic human identity endorsement, and World ID恰好 provides a decentralized solution.
Currently, WLD's market capitalization is $1.346 billion, with an FDV of $2.758 billion. The proportion of unlocked tokens is 48.80%.
Additionally, WLD continues to unlock 0.05% of the maximum supply daily, approximately 5.32 million tokens, valued at about $1.479 million. Calculated at this rate, the value of tokens unlocked monthly is approximately $44.369 million, which is expected to continue exerting significant selling pressure on the market.
