Hey Waivly Crew! 🌊 Sam Altman is close to raising $100 million in funding for Worldcoin. The U.S. DOJ's crypto enforcement unit plans to crackdown on crypto exchanges facilitating criminal activity.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman to raise $100M for Worldcoin
Worldcoin, the iris-scanning crypto project helmed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is reportedly in “advanced talks” for a fresh investment round worth over $100 million.
A Financial Times report published on Monday, which cited sources with knowledge of Worldcoin’s funding talks, stated that the round is backed by "existing and new investors."
Worldcoin’s previous investment round included funding from Khosla Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz’s (a16z) crypto fund, bringing the project’s valuation to $3 billion.
The firm also closed an a16z-led $25 million Series A funding round in October 2021, with other investors including Digital Currency Group, Coinbase Ventures, LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, and former FTX CEO Sam Bankman-Fried.
The project, which is still in beta, is reportedly preparing to launch within “the next six weeks.”
Founded by Altman and Alex Blania in 2019, Worldcoin aims to create a global digital currency that is distributed to everyone in the world in a fair and equitable manner.
According to the project’s website, “Worldcoin is building the world’s largest identity and financial network as a public utility, giving ownership to everyone.”
This news comes a week after Worldcoin launched its own gas-free crypto wallet for verified humans. The new wallet, called “World App,” runs on the Polygon network, allowing users to hold and transfer USD Coin, Dai, Ether, Worldcoin, and Wrapped Bitcoin.
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The Waves
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US DOJ promises crackdown on crypto exchanges
The U.S. Department of Justice's (DOJ) crypto unit has promised a crackdown on illicit behaviour on trading platforms, the Financial Times reported on Monday.
Eun Young Choi, director of the National Cryptocurrency Enforcement Team (NCET), said the DOJ is targeting crypto companies that engage in crimes themselves or allow crimes like money laundering to happen.
“They're allowing for all the other criminal actors to easily profit from their crimes and cash out in ways that are obviously problematic to us,” she said. "We hope that by focusing on those types of platforms, we’re going to have a multiplier effect."
The NCET also aims to bring more enforcement actions against investment scams, which Choi describes as "pig butchering" schemes, after a Chinese phrase referencing fattening pigs for slaughter, which involve scammers building relationships with victims over a period of months.
Last month, the agency seized around $112 million from six such scams. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has estimated that $3.31 billion was stolen from people through investment fraud in 2022, with crypto scams accounting for $2.57 billion of that figure.
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