The Worldcoin cryptocurrency project was launched this week, and judging by the posts of its founder Sam Altman (who also founded ChatGPT), it quickly gained massive popularity. People lined up in long queues to receive a World ID — what the project calls a “global digital passport” — along with WLD tokens as a reward.

The procedure uses a device called the Orb to scan a person’s retina and create a unique identifier. It is claimed that the data is not processed or stored locally.

According to the company, the system generates unique codes using artificial intelligence, and around 200 Orbs are currently available for registration. Interestingly, the founders of Worldcoin say the digital passport is needed at a time when “it will become increasingly difficult to distinguish a human from a robot due to the surge of artificial intelligence technologies.”

The World App itself will be available in 120 countries, and verification will be available in 35 cities across 20 countries, according to Worldcoin’s roadmap. By the end of 2023, 1,500 Orb devices are expected to be launched.

During the test phase, the Orbs scanned more than 2 million users, 64% of them from Asia and Africa, 19% from Latin America, and 17% from Europe.

On the day of the official launch, the price of WLD rose from $1.70 to $3.58. The cryptocurrency was listed on Binance and other exchanges at the same time that $145 million worth of tokens were sold, while Worldcoin’s share price fell by 29.4%.

According to the Financial Times, Worldcoin is currently unavailable in the United States due to regulatory restrictions, but investors have poured around $250 million into the project, including venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and Khosla Ventures, internet entrepreneur Reid Hoffman, and Sam Bankman-Fried before his FTX empire collapsed.