Sam Altman’s World expands its digital identity services to the US by announcing new partnerships with Tinder, Visa, and Stripe.
An announcement was made at World’s “At Last” event announcing the company's expansion. World is co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Alex Blania, and led by latter as its CEO.
The biometric ID company has a reputation for building easy-to-use, secure eyeball-scanning orbs for verification purposes. As per the Wednesday announcement, the company is now partnering with brands like the Match Group to provide Tinder users with a more efficient and accessible medium of verifying themselves.
This Tinder verification initiative is set to kickstart in Japan.
Beyond that, its partnership with Visa is set to launch The World Card. This will enable Visa card users to make payments through digital assets anywhere in the US where Visa is accepted as a payment medium.
The World Card project will enable US-based users to transact using their cryptocurrencies. This card will automate the process of converting crypto to fiat currencies and might also offer certain awards.
During the event, Blania made a statement:
“A lot of things influenced the decision. The political environment is certainly part of it, and kind of the outlook for regulatory clarity in the US was a big part of it.”
World is planning to open new manufacturing facilities in Texas. In parallel, there’s a plan to roll out 7,500 orbs by the year's end, starting with six cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco.
Beyond that, the event also unveiled a plan to launch Orb Mini. It’s an early-stage version of the flagship verification device that users can easily carry anywhere.
Along with Tinder, the gaming giant Razer is also partnering with World to verify human users.
The goal is to reduce the number of bots running fake profiles across digital platforms.
With 26 million global users, World aims to scale to billions, prioritizing privacy through decentralized data practices.
As a part of its endeavors, it’s also revamping The World app
Launched in July 2024 as Worldcoin, its network has almost doubled in size. The platform has onboarded over 26 million users in the last six months, while over 12 million users were verified using the platform.
With the launch of its hardware-and-app combo, World is planning to let users verify their irises on the go.
While World aspires to expand to billion users, there are challenges already knocking its door. For starters, Brazil and Hong Kong have banned Worldcoin and its features. Kenya, Portugal, and Spain have also rolled out temporary restrictions as soon as World was launched in these countries.
There was a six-month ban as well in Kenya after the government figured that World had violated Kenyan data-regulation rules.
