Sam Altman wants to scan your eyeball in exchange for cryptocurrency

Sam Altman has a startup that intends to give a special type of cryptocurrency to ev­ery per­son on earth. But first, it wants to scan everybody’s eye­balls. The former head of the Silicon Valley business incubator Y Combinator is one of Worldcoin’s three founders. Among the many parts of its plan, Worldcoin has designed an orb-shaped device that wo­uld scan a person’s iris to build a unique personal identifier.

The company is backed by Andreessen Horowitz, the ve­n­ture capital arm of Coin­base Global, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman and Day One Vent­ures. It recently raised about $25 million from investors.

Altman, 36, said he concei­ved the idea in late 2019. The intention was to use crypto­c­u­­rrency to spread money aro­und equitably, inspired by the trendy economic theory kno­wn as universal basic in­c­ome.