Worldcoin (WLD) is a blockchain-based digital project co-created by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which has created the artificial intelligence (AI) tool ChatGPT.
Data from Etherscan shows that the top 10 addresses holding Worldcoin ERC-20 tokens own 98.63% of its total supply of 10 billion WLD. The top two holders are smart contract addresses, holding 52.5% of all coins.
According to the project’s whitepaper, the top 2 contracts, “0x1770…2C296” (35%) and “0xaEE…80e57” (17.5%), belong to the Worldcoin Foundation, and are set as “Community Tokens Unlock Contracts” — not yet in circulation. There are two other contracts in the same category, with 8.75% of the supply each.
The numbers three (13.41%) and four (10%) in this rich list are both set as “TFH Team/Investors/Reserve Vesting/Unlock”, wallets 1 and 2. TFH is an acronym for Tools for Humanity, which is the registered company in charge of Worldcoin’s creation, development, and distribution.
Number seven (2.38%) is the address of a Cold Wallet, also controlled by Worldcoin’s team. Number eight — a smart contract — holds all WLD that will be used in the Optimism (OP) Network, accounting for 1.78% of the entire supply.
WLD being used on Optimism and other holders
Optimism is a Layer-2 (L2) for the Ethereum Network, which was created to host faster and cheaper transactions than its first layer. In the whitepaper, the Worldcoin Team says that most transactions for retail users will happen on Optimism.
So, although there are only 5,474 wallets holding the Worldcoin token on the Ethereum Network, most addresses will probably be created in the second layer, for more accessible transactions.
“0xC7C…23741” is the only unknown address among the top 10, holding 0.75% of all WLD. However, being unknown to etherscan.io and the Worldcoin whitepaper, the on-chain platform Dune Analytics identifies this wallet as belonging to Three Arrows Capital (3AC).
According to CryptoRank, 3AC invested in the first private funding round for Worldcoin in 2021. This funding round raised a total of $25 million, for a $1 billion valuation — and also had Sam Bankman-Fried, from the FTX, as an investor.
The last top 10 holder wallet belongs to Binance, the cryptocurrency exchange, with around 0.31% of the supply.
The Worldcoin project has raised concerns related to privacy, as the project promised to distribute the tokens to people who create a ‘World ID’ — by scanning their eyeballs with a tool called ‘Orb’, for its Proof of Personhood distribution method.
