More Than a Dozen Countries Now Investigating Sam Altman’s Dubious Eye-Scanning Scheme

It's not looking great.

Philanthropic Privacy

Sam Altman's lesser-known venture, a bizarre iris-scanning crypto project called Worldcoin, has faced scrutiny in more than a dozen countries because nobody really knows what it does with all those eyeball scans.

As the Wall Street Journal reports, jurisdictions around the world have cast a long shadow over the nominally altruistic project, which somehow seeks to marry crypto and biometrics to eventually provide a universal basic income for an unidentified number of people.

The scheme is supposed to work like this: you scan your iris with the metallic orb, operated by a volunteer enthusiast, and get 25 of its bespoke cryptocurrency coins in exchange. After that, your iris is attached to your identity on Worldcoin's supposedly secure blockchain, the opaque privacy of which is the subject of ample suspicion by governments worldwide.

By our count, based on reporting from the WSJ and the nonprofit Rest of World, Worldcoin has been under government scrutiny in at least 14 countries on three continents, including France, the United Kingdom, South Korea, and Chile.

Those numbers don't exactly inspire confidence — and neither do the company's moves to dissuade such scrutiny, either.

Failure to Launch

In an interview with the WSJ, Worldcoin's chief privacy officer Damian Kieran said that such distrust was inevitable and that the company is working with regulators. Thus far, however, the only big move to come out of such alleged cooperation is the company's promise to verify that people signing up are not underage after being caught signing up kids in Portugal — which makes the whole thing seem all the more dubious.

In many of the countries where the project has been investigated, meanwhile, probes have led to the currency being suspended within its borders. Thus far, only Kenya — which was one of the first countries where the project was piloted — has closed its probe after a year-long suspension of the Altman-led project.

In Argentina, the project was even fined $200,000 over alleged abusive clauses in its terms of service.

Notably, Worldcoin never officially launched its actual cryptocurrency in the United States due to "regulatory uncertainty," per its other cofounder Alex Bania, though that didn't stop this reporter from getting her eyeballs scanned in a Brooklyn coworking space using the strange orb.

More on Altman's altruism: Sam Altman Has Been Quietly Giving Out Money for Basic Incom