Reporters visited booths of Worldcoin, a global blockchain project championed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in Nairobi, Bengaluru, and Hong Kong to get a better sense of who was signing up for the service and why. In all three cities, the surge of interest for registering their biometrics to the blockchain was driven primarily by the sign-up bonuses. Relatively few people were familiar with the goals of the project.
Those are investments in the “project”, meaning the marketing with the hardware, websites, more marketing, and so on.
The WLD cryptocurrency had a $240M ICO in July 2023… which is cute, but means pretty much nothing, since there have been plenty of cryptocoins (shitcoins) that pocketed the ICO and disappeared, leaving the coin at $0.