Solana Will Get Support for Worldcoin’s World ID

Worldcoin’s World ID is set to expand to the Solana ecosystem, after Wormhole Labs received approximately $70,000 in funding from the Worldcoin Foundation.

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin was all the rage last summer, as the project’s co-founder claimed that people were enrolling every eight seconds on average. In an attempt to push the project back into the public consciousness, the Worldcoin Foundation launched a grants program, which set aside over $830,000 worth of WLD tokens to fund projects. 

One of those projects is the cross-chain protocol Wormhole, which intends to bring Worldcoin’s World ID to the Solana blockchain.

Wormhole helps transfer data and assets across over 30 blockchains, including Solana, Ethereum, and Binance Smart Chain. This latest move will bring Worldcoin’s World ID, originally built on Ethereum and layer-2 scaling network Optimism, to Solana.

World ID is the technology at the core of the Worldcoin project. By scanning your eye using one of Worldcoin’s Orbs, you are given an IrisCode, which is then used to generate a World ID. This process is done to prove your “personhood” and eliminate the possibility that you’re a robot, as a response to rapid advances in artificial intelligence (AI).

Once you’ve proved you’re a real person, you can use the World App. This allows users to reveal information about themselves while remaining private through the platform’s ID system. On top of this, the World App doubles as a crypto wallet, allowing users to store Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDC.

The company claimed that over 2 million people signed up for the project, attracting regulatory investigations from a number of nations. France and Germany, for example, coordinated an investigation on the legality of the project, while Kenya completely banned it.

Wormhole is now aiming to enable Solana-based protocols to verify users’ World IDs that were originally verified on Ethereum. For this to happen, a new Solana smart contract will leverage Wormhole Queries, a cross-chain data retrieval service.

The announcement comes the same day that the first public attempt to launch a spot Solana ETF in the U.S. was made. VanEck filed for a Solana ETF in the U.S. on Thursday, which swiftly saw the token’s price spike 6.6% within the hour.