Flash Crash Down 97%+ with Ongoing Unlocking, WLD Completes $65 Million Off-chain Funding: Who Is Still Buying?

Original Title: "Off-chain 'Financing' of $65 Million, World Holding Big Move?"

Original Author: Mach, Foresight News

On March 28, the World Foundation announced that it had completed an off-exchange sale of WLD tokens totaling $65 million, with an average price of $0.2719. The transaction involved four counterparties, with the first settlement completed on March 20, 2026, where $25 million worth of WLD tokens had a 6-month lock-up period. Officially, the funds raised will be used directly for project core operations, R&D investment, Orb hardware manufacturing, and ecosystem development, with all settlements executed through the multi-signature address 0xE797 of World Assets.

In the current deep bear market environment, completing a multi-million dollar token transaction is quite rare. The last time the World Foundation conducted a large-scale token financing was back in May 2025 when its subsidiary World Assets sold $135 million worth of WLD tokens to early supporters a16z and Bain Capital Crypto at market price.

Looking back at WLD's full journey in this cycle, it can be seen as a textbook case study of going from frenzy to reality. In July 2023, Worldcoin (now renamed World) officially launched WLD, quickly becoming a market focus thanks to Sam Altman's personal endorsement, the AI large model craze, and the unique narrative of "human uniqueness proof."

In March 2024, resonating with the Bitcoin halving cycle and AI concepts, the price of WLD skyrocketed within a month, reaching a historical high of around $11.8, with a market cap approaching $10 billion. That year, global users enthusiastically registered for World ID through Orb iris scans, positioning the project as the top seed player of Web3 identity infrastructure.

But after the high, it quickly fell silent. In the second half of 2024, following an overall crypto market downturn, strict scrutiny of biometric data by regulatory bodies such as the EU, and the visible pressure of the project's large-scale unlock, the WLD price began to freefall.

Throughout 2025, the price of WLD fluctuated between $0.5 and $1.5, with iris adoption rates steadily increasing but far from early expectations, showing a significant disconnection between user growth and narrative hype. Entering 2026, WLD continued to bottom out, recently hitting a new low of $0.2433, currently hovering around $0.27, with a cumulative drop from its all-time high exceeding 97%.

In this cycle, the price trend of the WLD token closely resembles the three-act play of most meme coins: Idea-Driven → Supply Pressure → Real-World Test. The early premium mainly came from the Altman IP and AI trend, while in the later stage, it was suppressed by continuous unlocks and macro tightening.

Interestingly, just before announcing its large OTC deal, on March 25, the World website officially released a research report titled "Private Proof of Human: Critical Infrastructure for Humanity in a World with Advanced AI." The paper directly addresses the core pain point of the AI-agent era: how to establish a reliable and privacy-preserving "proof of human" infrastructure in a machine-flooded digital world.

The paper elaborates on the Orb iris scanning hardware combined with secure multi-party computation (SMPC) and zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) technical solution, which can efficiently verify human uniqueness while completely avoiding personal biometric data leakage, making it more forward-looking and secure than traditional face recognition or passport verification. This solution is positioned as the future foundation of internet trust, capable of effectively combating deepfakes and AI bot attacks.

On March 26, a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen retweeted this paper on the X platform, adding a brief yet impactful comment: "It's time for proof of humanity."

In the current AI-driven reshaping of productivity, PoH will become a necessity to distinguish between humans and machines and rebuild the trust layer of the digital economy.

On March 17, World had previously launched AgentKit, where the Agent completes registration through World ID proof, associating the wallet with an anonymous human identity. The agent signs a standard authentication challenge at a protected endpoint, and the agent's signature matches the associated human identity, granting access upon successful matching. The official documentation states that the AgentKit agent can also be applied to privacy protection, ticketing systems, access frequency limits, and anti-sybil attacks.

On April 17, World will host the "Lift Off" World ID Global Launch Event in San Francisco, where Sam Altman will personally attend and co-host with World CEO Alex.

The conference's theme focuses on the latest developments in World ID, Orb hardware iteration, and human verification applications in the AI era. Altman's presence, in itself a symbol of top-tier traffic and confidence, is more likely to signal the potential synergy between OpenAI and World — AI agents need endorsement from real human identities, and World ID happens to provide a decentralized solution.

Currently, WLD has a market value of $1.346 billion, a FDV of $2.758 billion, and 48.80% of unlocked tokens.

Furthermore, 0.05% of the maximum daily WLD supply is still unlocked, approximately 5.32 million tokens worth around $1.479 million. Based on this calculation, the monthly value of unlocked tokens is approximately $44.369 million, which is expected to continue exerting significant selling pressure on the market.

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