Original title: "OTC Financing of 65 Million USD, Is World Deep Bear Holding Back?."

Original author: Ma He, Foresight News

On March 28, the World Foundation announced that it has completed an OTC sale of WLD tokens totaling 65 million USD, with an average transaction price of 0.2719 USD. This transaction involved four counterparties, with the first settlement completed on March 20, 2026, and 25 million USD WLD tokens subject to a 6-month lock-up period. The official statement indicated that the funds obtained will be used directly for core project operations, R&D investment, Orb hardware manufacturing, and ecosystem construction, with all settlements executed through the multi-signature address of World Assets, 0xE797.

In the current deep bear market environment, completing token transactions worth tens of millions of dollars is quite rare. The last significant token financing by the World Foundation dates back to May 2025, when its subsidiary, World Assets, sold 135 million USD worth of WLD tokens to early supporters a16z and Bain Capital Crypto at market price.

Looking back at the complete trend of WLD in this cycle, it can be regarded as a textbook case from fanaticism to reality. In July 2023, Worldcoin (now renamed World) officially launched WLD, quickly becoming the market focus due to Sam Altman's personal endorsement, the AI large model boom, and the unique narrative of "Proof of Humanity."

In March 2024, under the resonance of the Bitcoin halving cycle and the AI concept, the price of WLD surged in the month, reaching a historic high of approximately 11.8 USD, with the market value approaching 10 billion USD at one point. That year, global users registered for a World ID via Orb iris scanning enthusiastically, and the project was seen as the number one seed player in Web3 identity infrastructure.

However, after the highlights, it quickly returned to silence. In the second half of 2024, as the overall crypto market corrected, regulatory bodies such as the EU conducted strict reviews of biometric data, and the project faced significant unlocking pressure, the price of WLD began to plummet.

Throughout 2025, the price of WLD oscillated between 0.5-1.5 USD, with the iris adoption rate increasing steadily, but far from early expectations, leading to a significant disconnect between user growth and narrative popularity. Entering 2026, WLD continued to hit new lows, recently touching a new low of 0.2433 USD, currently hovering around 0.27 USD, a cumulative decline of over 97% from its ATH.

In this cycle, the price trend of WLD resembles the trilogy of most altcoins: Concept Driven → Supply Pressure → Implementation Test, with early premiums mainly coming from Altman’s IP and the AI hype, later suppressed by continued unlocks and macro tightening.

Interestingly, just before announcing the large OTC, on March 25, World’s official website released a research report titled "Private Proof of Human: Critical Infrastructure for Humanity in a World with Advanced AI," which directly addresses the core pain point of the AI agent era: how to establish a reliable and privacy-protecting "proof of humanity" infrastructure in a world flooded with machines.

The paper elaborates on the technical solution of combining Orb iris scanning hardware with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) and zero-knowledge proofs (ZKP), which can efficiently verify human uniqueness while completely avoiding the leakage of personal biometric data, making it more forward-looking and secure than traditional facial recognition or passport validation. This solution is positioned as the foundational trust of the future internet, effectively countering deepfakes and AI robotic attacks.

On March 26, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen shared the paper on X platform, along with a brief yet significant comment: It's time for proof of humanity.

In an era where AI reshapes productivity, PoH will become a necessity to differentiate between humans and machines, and to rebuild the trust layer of the digital economy.

On March 17, World launched AgentKit, where the agent registers by proving through World ID, linking the wallet with an anonymous human identity. The agent signs standard identity verification challenges at protected endpoints, matching the agent signature with the associated human identity, granting access once matched successfully. The official presentation states that AgentKit agents can also be applied to privacy protection, ticketing systems, access frequency limits, and prevention of witch attacks.

On April 17, World will hold the "Lift Off" Global Release Conference for World ID in San Francisco, where Sam Altman will personally attend and co-host with World CEO Alex.

The conference will focus on the latest developments of World ID, Orb hardware iterations, and human verification application scenarios in the AI era. Altman's presence, in itself, symbolizes top-tier traffic and confidence, and is more likely to signal the potential synergy between OpenAI and World—AI agents need real human identity endorsement, and World ID precisely offers a decentralized solution.

Currently, WLD has a market capitalization of 1.346 billion USD, an FDV of 2.758 billion USD, with 48.80% of tokens already unlocked.

In addition, WLD continues to unlock the maximum supply of 0.05% daily, approximately 5.32 million tokens, valued at about 1.479 million USD. Based on this calculation, the tokens unlocked each month are worth approximately 44.369 million USD, which is expected to continue exerting selling pressure on the market.

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