The Worldcoin project is about giving tokens to people who prove they are human, to ensure we can have a living when AI becomes rampant in the future. This idea was created by Sam Altman of OpenAI, and it is now very popular.
In South Korea, this project is also very popular. About 90,000 people have downloaded the World App, and 30,000 of them have completed iris authentication. However, they have encountered legal problems there. Because they did not follow the rules to collect personal information, they were fined 1.1 billion won, which is about 800,000 US dollars.
It is said that the Worldcoin Foundation and TFH, which helps them process information, collected personal information without permission, including sensitive data such as iris data, and did not tell users what they would do with it or how long they would store it. What's more, they secretly transferred the information of Koreans to foreign countries, such as Germany.
The Worldcoin Foundation has not even built a way for users to delete or pause the processing of iris information, and TFH has not done enough to verify the age of children under 14 when registering. This is a big deal because South Korea accounts for a large part of WLD's trading volume. As of October 6, South Korean exchanges accounted for 16% of WLD's total trading volume, most of which was traded on Bithumb, which has the second largest trading volume after Binance.
Someone named @DefiSquared criticized Worldcoin on Twitter, saying that WLD's valuation was ridiculously high, that the project team might be suspected of price manipulation, and that the token economics model was particularly favorable to insiders. He also warned that retail investors in South Korea might be out of luck because although only 2.7% of WLD was in circulation, the fully diluted value was as high as $30 billion, with 25% of the circulating supply on Bithumb.
Did you know? Many people may not even understand English, but they bought WLD without knowing what was going on. Google Trends also shows that the search volume for "Worldcoin" in Korean is closely related to the price trend of WLD, which means that Koreans are more likely to buy WLD when the price is high. As a result, WLD rose to $12 and then fell 90%, and many people may have lost a lot of money.
What’s more regrettable is that not only young people who understand cryptocurrency, but also the elderly have been attracted to Worldcoin and run to Orb to authenticate their irises and get tokens. Although it is not clear whether these elderly people also bought WLD tokens, if they did, the loss would be significant.
These Orbs are installed in many places in Seoul, especially in restaurants. Every time a new person authenticates their iris, the operator of the Orb gets WLD as a reward. So, these places encourage customers to authenticate their iris and get "free tokens".
But this marketing method also makes people worry. What if they collect iris information from uninformed elderly people? When Worldcoin was at its peak in March, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission began investigating because of a large number of complaints.
Although it is theoretically impossible to reconstruct personal biometric information from the iris code generated by the Orb scan, most people don't understand these technologies. The act of scanning irises may be offensive, which is why it has caused controversy.
