Wedbush’s Dan Ives Joins Eightco to Lead $250M Worldcoin Strategy
Wall Street tech analyst Dan Ives is becoming a member of Eightco Holdings as chairman to lead a $250 million technique centered on Worldcoin (WLD), the token tied to Sam Altman’s biometric id startup, World.
Key Takeaways:
- Dan Ives has joined Eightco as chairman to lead a $250 million Worldcoin-focused treasury technique.
- Eightco will rebrand its ticker to ORBS after closing a $250 million personal placement by mid-September.
- Worldcoin goals to construct a common ID system utilizing biometric verification in a future formed by AI.
Eightco, which trades beneath the Nasdaq ticker OCTO, introduced Monday that Ives will head its board of administrators and oversee a treasury initiative targeted on buying Worldcoin as a core digital asset, in accordance to a Monday report by CNBC.
Eightco to Raise $250M and Rebrand Ticker to ORBS by Mid-September
The firm additionally disclosed a $250 million personal placement, set to shut round September 11, after which it plans to rebrand its ticker to “ORBS.”
“I view World because the de facto normal for authentication and identification sooner or later world of AI,” Ives advised CNBC, emphasizing that this isn’t simply one other crypto play.
The transfer echoes a current pattern of conventional finance names crossing into crypto. In June, Tom Lee of Fundstrat joined BitMine Immersion Technologies, an organization targeted on accumulating ETH, which has since soared over 800%.
BitMine can also be backing Eightco with a $20 million strategic funding, a part of its broader “Moonshot” technique aimed toward supporting bold tasks within the Ethereum ecosystem.
Ives’ resolution aligns with a rising variety of public companies adopting the MicroStrategy mannequin, leveraging capital markets to purchase crypto for his or her steadiness sheets.
While Bitcoin stays a core treasury asset for a lot of, newer entrants are reaching deeper into the crypto stack, concentrating on tokens with particular use instances and better upside potential.
Worldcoin, launched in 2023, goals to construct a common id system via biometric verification. Users obtain a “World ID” tied to an iris scan and are rewarded with WLD tokens for taking part.
The undertaking’s imaginative and prescient, authenticating actual people in a digital world more and more formed by AI, has caught the eye of each crypto and conventional finance gamers.
“As the AI infrastructure grows, identification turns into the limiting issue,” Ives stated, pointing to the position Worldcoin may play in a future dominated by digital brokers and deepfakes.
Worldcoin presently holds a market cap of round $1 billion, a fraction of Bitcoin’s $2 trillion or Ethereum’s $518 billion, per CoinGecko.
Worldcoin’s World ID Hits 100M Uses
As reported, Worldcoin’s digital id system, World ID, has surpassed 100 million uses throughout third-party apps, marking a significant milestone for Sam Altman’s identity-focused crypto initiative.
However, the token’s efficiency tells a special story. WLD stays down 89% from its all-time high of $11.74, presently buying and selling round $0.88, regardless of a quick spike following Sam Altman’s $6.5 billion collaboration with designer Jony Ive.
Mounting regulatory stress and uncertainty proceed to weigh on the undertaking, prompting a rebrand to World Network and the rollout of recent id instruments like NFC passport verification, aimed toward privacy-friendly onboarding.
Germany’s GDPR violation ruling triggered widespread information deletion requests, contributing to WLD falling under $2 in December 2024.
France, Portugal, Spain, Hong Kong, and South Korea have all launched investigations into the undertaking’s information practices.
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