Vast Majority of Worldcoin Tokens Held by Top Wallets
Worldcoin (WLD), the brainchild of Openai CEO Sam Altman, made its debut on centralized crypto exchanges in late July 2023. The cryptocurrency’s main goal is to verify users’ identities through iris scanning and address financial inequality and online identity authentication with its World ID feature.
Initially, WLD reached its peak price of $3.30 per token on July 24. However, the price has since dropped, currently fluctuating between $1.20 and $1.38. On September 5, it hit an all-time low of $1.02 per coin. Despite a 26% increase in WLD wallets since August 11, with over 591,633 unique addresses as of September 7, the rate of growth has slowed down.
Sluggish Growth and Centralized Ownership
From July 24 to August 18, new WLD wallets expanded rapidly, but the growth has significantly decelerated since then, increasing by just over 11% during that period. This suggests that the initial surge of adoption for Worldcoin has transitioned into a more steady and modest climb. However, while there are almost 600,000 WLD wallets, the top 100 wallets control 93.82% of the total supply of 176.89 million WLD.
The 100 addresses with the largest supply hold 165.96 million WLD tokens. The Worldcoin contract address operated by the development team possesses 95.87 million WLD, accounting for 54.2% of the supply. Worldcoin also owns the second largest wallet, containing 30.98 million tokens or 17.51% of the supply.
Other major holders of WLD tokens include Binance, the largest crypto exchange by trade volume, which holds 12.05 million WLD (6.81% of the supply), Wintermute, a market maker, and crypto exchanges such as Bithumb, Okx, and Gate.io.
Promoting Financial Inclusion
Despite Worldcoin’s mission to address financial inequality, the ownership of WLD tokens remains highly centralized. For Worldcoin to truly achieve its goal of promoting financial inclusion, ownership must be more widely distributed among everyday users, rather than being concentrated in the hands of the founders, exchanges, and market makers.
Hot Take
The centralized ownership of WLD tokens is a significant barrier to achieving Worldcoin’s vision of financial equality. To overcome this, the project must actively work towards distributing tokens to individual users and reducing the dominance of top wallets. By doing so, Worldcoin can establish a more decentralized ecosystem that empowers and includes a wider range of participants. Without addressing this issue, Worldcoin risks alienating potential users who may perceive it as just another exclusive cryptocurrency controlled by a select few.
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