Off-chain financing of $65 million, is Deep Bear preparing a big move?

Original Author: Ma He, Foresight News

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

In the current deep bearish market environment, completing tens of millions of dollars in token transactions is quite rare. The last time the World Foundation conducted a large token financing was back in May 2025, when its subsidiary World Assets sold $135 million worth of WLD tokens at market prices to early supporters a16z and Bain Capital Crypto.

Looking back at the complete trajectory of WLD in this cycle, it is a textbook case of a journey from frenzy to reality. In July 2023, Worldcoin (now renamed World) officially launched WLD, quickly becoming the market focus thanks to the personal endorsement of Sam Altman, the AI large model boom, and the unique narrative of “proof of human uniqueness.”

By March 2024, amidst the Bitcoin halving cycle and the resonance with the AI concept, WLD’s price skyrocketed in a single month, reaching an all-time high of about $11.8, with its market value briefly approaching $10 billion. That year, global users registered for World ID through Orb iris scans with unprecedented enthusiasm, and the project was regarded as the top seed player in Web3 identity infrastructure.

However, after the spotlight faded, it quickly returned to silence. In the second half of 2024, as the overall crypto market corrected, regulatory bodies like the EU imposed strict scrutiny on biometric data, and the project’s own large-scale unlocking pressure emerged, the price of WLD began to plummet.

Throughout 2025, the price of WLD fluctuated between $0.5 and $1.5. Although the iris adoption rate steadily advanced, it was far from early expectations, and user growth significantly diverged from the narrative’s heat. Entering 2026, WLD continued to search for a bottom, recently touching a new low of $0.2433 and currently hovering around $0.27, with a cumulative decline of over 97% from its ATH.

In this cycle, the price trajectory of WLD closely resembles the trilogy of most altcoins: concept-driven → supply pressure → real-world testing, with early premiums primarily stemming from Altman’s IP and the AI wave, later suppressed by ongoing unlocks and macro tightening.

Interestingly, just before the announcement of the large OTC sale, 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 points of the AI agency era: how to establish a reliable and privacy-protecting “proof of human” infrastructure in a digital world flooded with machines.

The paper elaborated on the technical solutions 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 verification. This solution is positioned as the foundation of trust for the future internet, effectively combating deepfakes and AI robot attacks.

On March 26, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen shared this paper on the X platform, accompanied by a short yet weighty comment: It’s time for proof of humanity.

In an era where AI is reshaping productivity, PoH will become essential for distinguishing humans from machines and rebuilding trust layers in the digital economy.

On March 17, World launched AgentKit, which operates by having its agents complete registration through World ID, associating wallets with anonymous human identities. The agents sign standard identity verification challenges at protected endpoints, matching the agent signatures with their associated human identities, granting access upon successful matching. The official application scenarios indicate that AgentKit agents can also be applied in privacy protection, ticketing systems, access frequency restrictions, and preventing witch attacks.

On April 17, World will hold the “Lift Off” global launch event for World ID in San Francisco, with Sam Altman personally attending and co-hosting with world CEO Alex.

The conference theme will focus on the latest developments in World ID, Orb hardware iterations, and human verification application scenarios in the AI era. Altman’s presence itself symbolizes top-tier traffic and confidence, and more likely signals the potential collaboration between OpenAI and World—AI agents need authentic human identity endorsement, and World ID just provides a decentralized solution.

Currently, WLD has a market value of $1.346 billion, an FDV of $2.758 billion, and the proportion of unlocked tokens stands at 48.80%.

Additionally, WLD still unlocks a maximum supply of 0.05% daily, approximately 5.32 million tokens, valued at about $1.479 million. Based on this calculation, the monthly unlocked token value is approximately $44.369 million, which is expected to exert significant selling pressure on the market.