Crypto
A hand holding the latest orb from World, formerly known as Worldcoin.
(World)

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin rebrands and launches a fresh “orb”

Pondering the orb.

World wants you to forget about that whole coin thing.

The company formerly known as Worldcoin has rebranded, chopping the “coin” from its name and doubling down on its stated goal of providing “proof of human verifications.” In addition to the name change, on Thursday World announced an updated version of its iris-scanning orb device that — if you believe the company — will help humans distinguish themselves from AI. The post lauded the technology within the Orb, noting it’s “equipped with the most advanced NVIDIA Jetson module with nearly 5x the AI performance over the previous version.”

In 2021, World cofounder Sam Altman told Bloomberg that the project was intended to help distribute a cryptocurrency. And World did launch a token, WLD, in 2023. At the time, the project’s tokenomics were criticized as allocating too large of a percentage of WLD tokens to World insiders.

World also unveiled a new tool, World ID Deep Face. The company said Deep Face will work to verify that the person on the other end of a video call isn’t a digital fake, something that’s an increasing concern as GenAI models like Sora rapidly improve and are able to create convincing deepfakes of people.

As of Friday morning, the WLD token was priced at $2.18 — down more than 80% from it’s all-time high of $11.82 in March.

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The decentralized finance ecosystem had a brutal April, logging the highest monthly number of exploits ever at 28 hacks, with exploiters siphoning off a total of $635.2 million, data from DefiLlama shows. 

The two largest exploits in April occurred on ethereum-based protocol KelpDAO and solana-native trading venue Drift. The incidents rattled on-chain users, as the total value locked in DeFi across all networks dropped from a monthly high of $99.5 billion to $84.3 billion on Friday. 

“It’s a real problem, and if AI proponents (thinking specifically of Anthropic’s claims about Mythos) are to be believed, it’s only going to get worse,” according to Fredrick Collins, CEO of crypto analytics platform Velo.xyz. Collins argued that these exploits act as a significant limiter of institutional appeal, pointing to TheBlock’s report last week that JPMorgan held a similar view. 

“It’s simple — for many people, having any chance that you lose your entire investment or balance in something supposed to be ‘safe’ is too much to bear,” Collins told Sherwood News. 

However, not everyone thinks the recent hacks will curb interest from institutions. Nicolai Søndergaard, a research analyst at blockchain data firm Nansen, said to Sherwood, “I do not think these hacks will be a limit to institutional capital given the impact of AI and the speed at which threats appear stretch far beyond this industry.” 

Søndergaard continued, “Crypto to me seems to have been hit harder as many projects perhaps wanted to get a product out there quickly and didn’t invest enough in security, even with companies around to audit.” 

DeFi aims to enable internet users to have access to financial services, such as borrowing, lending, and trading, without any centralized intermediaries.

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Riot Platforms rises following Q1 revenue beat

The bitcoin miner turned data center operator released first-quarter earnings that surpassed expectations for revenue. Shares built on strong gains from Thursday’s session in after-hours trading following the results.

Riot Platforms reported:

  • Q1 revenue of $167.2 million, growing 3.6% from the same quarter a year ago and surpassing analysts’ expectations of $131 million.

  • A diluted loss per share of $1.44, much worse than analysts’ consensus estimate of a $0.72 loss, which includes unrealized loss on its bitcoin holdings.

The bulk of companys revenue stems from its bitcoin mining activity, which made up $111.9 million in the quarter, while its data center housing revenue stood at $33.2 million, per its press release.

The first quarter of 2026 marks an inflection point for Riot. CFO Jason Chung said on Thursday in the firms Q1 earnings conference call, With the delivery of our first 5 megawatts to AMD this quarter, Riot is now an active data center operator, and for the first time, our top line now includes contracted lease revenue from an investment-grade tenant.

The earnings report comes the same week the company announced amending its $200 million credit agreement with Coinbase by replacing a floating interest rate with a fixed rate, according to an SEC filing dated on Monday.

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