Sam Altman’s Dual Bet on Identity and AI

A fresh surge for a once-forgotten project

The crypto-treasury trend has just notched its first addition of Worldcoin (WLD) to a corporate balance sheet. Eightco, a publicly listed logistics company, has set itself the goal of digitising every person’s identity and has brought in Wall Street veteran Dan Ives to help.

ForkLog looks at how Sam Altman’s two creations—World and ChatGPT—may be knitted together.

From boxes to cryptocurrencies

On 8 September 2025 the Eightco holding company announced a “first of its kind” strategy to acquire Worldcoin tokens. These are used to provide rewards in exchange for digital identity verification in World, a project by Alex Blania and the creator of ChatGPT, Sam Altman.

Eightco was founded in September 2021 in Nevada under the name Cryptyde.
On 9 March 2022 it was converted into a corporation under Delaware law, and in October it acquired Forever 8 Fund, a unit that purchases and manages inventory for e-commerce sellers. On 4 April 2023 the firm changed its name to Eightco Holdings.

The group’s portfolio included Ferguson Containers, a corrugated packaging manufacturing and logistics firm. In April 2025 the company sold most of those assets to focus on fintech.

The core Forever 8 unit buys certain goods from a seller’s inventory, then replenishes future orders using a proprietary end-to-end verification tool. Merchant clients thus unlock cash flow and can focus on growing the business.

Throughout 2024 the company improved its balance sheet: it cut expenses, shed some debt and strengthened shareholders’ equity metrics.

By joining the digital-treasury trend, Eightco Holdings’ shares surged 5,632% on the first day of trading, peaking around $83. On 11 September, by board decision, the Nasdaq ticker was changed from OCTO to ORBS. The name refers to the iris-scanning devices—Orbs. The gesture appears to signal its long-term intent.

According to Bloomberg, on the day the new strategy was announced Eightco’s market capitalisation topped $190m. Previously it had been only about $4.4m.

Before the opening bell, Eightco’s management said it had sold about 171.2m shares at $1.46 apiece to finance WLD purchases. The company also noted it could add Ethereum (ETH) as a second reserve currency in future.

Eightco raised $250m via a private placement among crypto-oriented investors. It was led by MOZAYYX with participation from World Foundation, as well as Discovery Capital Management and Kraken.

Cantor Fitzgerald—the brokerage controlled by the family of US commerce secretary Howard Lutnick—served as financial adviser to MOZAYYX.

Eightco raised an additional $20m via a deal with bitcoin miner Bitmine Immersion Technologies.

On 8 September, according to TradingView, WLD jumped by roughly 120% in 24 hours to $2.2. The token’s market capitalisation reached $4bn.

A Wall Street standard-bearer

To develop its crypto-treasury strategy, Eightco appointed Wedbush Securities managing director Dan Ives. The Wall Street analyst has chosen electric vehicles and frontier technologies like World as his main research focus for the next decade.

On 23 September, in an interview with stock-market commentator Amit Kukreja, Ives characterised Sam Altman’s initiative as a technological infrastructure play, predicting that in future it will become “the single sign-on for AI”.

Always awesome to have a deep dive on tech stocks, AI Revolution, and ORBS @Iamhuman_ORBS with my good friend @amitisinvesting 🔥🏆🍿🐂👇 https://t.co/pEzqohq4Si

— Dan Ives (@DivesTech) September 22, 2025

On 29 September Eightco announced the “Power of Eight” initiative. Its goal is to accumulate 8% of the WLD supply—800m tokens—and to verify 8bn people.

Today we announced the ‘power of 8%’

— $ORBS intends to acquire 8% of $WLD supply
— 800 million Worldcoin (WLD)
— and 8 billion verified humanshttps://t.co/HltMNQGuQ3

— ORBS Official (NASDAQ: $ORBS) crypto $WLD (@Iamhuman_ORBS) September 29, 2025

The company reported on the results of the past three weeks and their impact on Altman’s start-up.

“Since September 8, World has added more than 1.9m verified people, bringing the total to 16.9m with a goal of reaching 100m over the next 12 months,” project representatives said.

Ives also stressed that “World is the single sign-on for the AI era, for the first time enabling trust and anonymous transactions online.” He also offered a forecast for WLD’s future price:

“In the AI value chain, LLMs are valued at $3 trillion, hyperscalers at $3 trillion, cybersecurity at $1–2 trillion, and the most important of these—‘proof of personhood’, or human cybersecurity—is valued at $10 billion. Over time the verification of ‘proof of personhood’ should easily be comparable in value to one LLM, i.e., worth $200–300 billion, which implies a Worldcoin price of $20–30 per WLD coin.”

Sooner or later, it will happen

When one person is behind two breakthrough, adjacent, high-tech products, logic suggests they will be connected.

On 24 July 2023, on the Bankless podcast, OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman gave a somewhat hazy answer to a question about merging World and ChatGPT technologies:

“I think it’s still too early to talk about specifics, but as we watch this process over the next decade, I hope it will become obvious.”

A year ago, Tools for Humanity CEO Alex Blania said he aimed to cover the world with Orbs. At the time the company had only 6.5m authentications. In October 2024 it underwent a rebrand with new device models.

In May 2025, further positive news came. The updated Orb Mini line had already attracted major partners.

Visa plans to integrate World ID into debit cards for secure payments, Tinder is testing the technology in Japan to verify dating-app users, and Razer intends to use it in games to filter bots.

By year-end 7,500 portable scanners will be installed across the United States—in popular venues, offices and other public locations.

Regulators in China, the United Kingdom, Germany, Argentina, Colombia, Singapore and Kenya have raised concerns about World’s collection of citizens’ biometric data.

Despite regulatory troubles in various countries, World continues to expand. After launching in the United States, Altman’s company expanded to the United Kingdom.