From SF, to the World, Back to the USA: World’s Path To Exceeding Bitcoin’s Distribution

By Jake Brukhman
May 8, 2025

“We started the company right here in San Francisco, near South Park. We wanted to scale it to the entire world from here,” said World CEO Alex Blania, standing onstage next to his Co-Founder and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at the At Last event last week. “Of course, what has been missing is the United States of America.” 

The crowd erupted into loud cheers as the screen behind Alex and Sam revealed a red, white and blue graphic with the long-awaited message: “Now available in the USA.” 

After investing in their first round at the end of 2020, it was exciting to see World launch in the US nearly five years later. It is a pivotal moment for not only the expansion of digital identity across the nation, but its ability to increase distribution. All of World’s users so far have come from abroad and a US launch signals that the network might be ready to double or triple its user base.

 

Since CoinFund invested in World, we have held the belief that biometric proof of personhood will be vital to our digital experiences, will solve core problems in web3, and ultimately will make blockchain technology more usable and widely distributed. As AI gets more sophisticated, distinguishing humans from AIs or bots is only becoming a more prevalent and challenging problem, which can easily be mitigated if more applications adopted World’s identity verification technology. Today, World stands as the most privacy-preserving biometric proof of personhood available globally. It uses advanced cryptographic technology like ZK proofs and blockchains to ensure user safety and data sovereignty. In comparison, related technologies like Clear store user biometrics in centralized databases — and may even share them with third parties. World’s focus on privacy and “web3 compliance” has earned it 26 million iOS users and 12.4 million verified iris scans to date. 

World’s US launch comes at a critical moment in the country’s crypto regulatory landscape as well as AI’s rapid proliferation. The number of use cases for proof of personhood as well as the distribution of World’s native token $WLD continue to grow. Gaming, dating, and social media – according to Alex at the San Francisco launch – will be key areas for real-world integrations. In addition to its continued gaming partnership with Razer stores, at the event, World shared details around integration with online dating conglomerate Match Group, teased its upcoming social media implementations, and announced partnerships with large names in fintech including stablecoin issuer Circle, prediction market Kalshi, payments platform Stripe, and credit card company Visa. To help get more users verified, World discussed its upcoming store openings in Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and for a more portable experience, announced its rolling out Orb Minis – iPhone-sized devices to provide on-the-go iris scans. If you are in Miami on May 8th, find me at the grand opening of World Miami in Wynwood.

It is an exciting time for World to bring digital identity to new audiences, but World is also a consumer blockchain play. World Chain is the only blockchain in the world that can count its human users and give them a discount on transaction fees. The World Miniapp Store presents web3 functionality like DeFi and crypto-enabled gaming as incredibly low-friction experiences – a first for web3 go-to-markets. And as an app store, it has clear value propositions for developers, from millions of users on the demand side to a plethora of new crypto-based business models that are freely available to them. 

In the summer of 2023, I joined Laura Shin’s Unchained podcast to discuss CoinFund’s  investment thesis in World. I explained that one of the core ideas behind World is that if you can widely distribute a digital asset, you can build a cryptocurrency that’s bigger and more valuable than Bitcoin. While it has nearly been two years since I made this claim, it may only be another one or two years before World achieves this milestone. 

While Bitcoin has 750,000 daily active users, World has accumulated 1.7 million daily active users – over two times the largest cryptocurrency by market cap – thanks to its wide range of mini apps across gaming, payments and DeFi. Still, the Bitcoin users who ‘HODL’ take the lead, with 30 million monthly active users compared to World’s 8 million. 

With less than 1,000 Orbs in circulation, World has scanned 12.4 million irises in 2 years. This number of devices is set to increase with the opening of new flagship stores and the distribution of Orb Minis, helping World be ready to rapidly increase its user count. World can be at parity with Bitcoin’s 100 million users, it just needs to convert 74 million more. At its onboarding peak last year, World was registering 1 million registered users per day, and about 500,000 of those were getting verified. At those rates, it wouldn’t be crazy to surpass Bitcoin with fully verified World users in less than a year.

World is excelling in all of its product lines, and I believe it is the best and most privacy-preserving biometric identity on the market. It is also the most usable and human-friendly blockchain. And it is the foremost web3 consumer project today on every measure.

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