Funding protocol growth

Today, more than 8 million people have an Orb-verified World ID, a secure and anonymized digital passport that allows individuals to prove they are a unique human in the intelligence age. World Network continues to grow rapidly, currently adding more than 300,000 Orb-verified humans and more than 790,000 network users per week.

To meet the increasing demand for Orb-verified World IDs around the world and support the growth of the World network, World Assets Limited (a subsidiary of the World Foundation) conducts recurrent tranche-based WLD sales to trading firms, as described here.

While the existing sales have sufficiently funded operations and growth, the World Foundation has identified the need to create a capital buffer. To that end, World Assets recently sold 59.5M WLD tokens from its treasury to a select group of private institutional investors. This capital buffer will be critical to ensure financial resilience and operational continuity amid fluctuating market conditions. 

To align these investors with the long-term orientation of the World project, those sales include a 1-year lock-up, followed by a 3-months daily linear unlock. The circulating supply of WLD will thus begin to increase correspondingly in approximately one year (for live metrics, see Dune).

World Assets does not anticipate any further OTC token sales of this form. Instead, the tranche-based sales to trading firms are expected to continue. Ultimately, however, it is anticipated that World Network will become one of the first self-sustaining protocols (e.g., via protocol fees) and phase out the need to engage in token sales.

As with all historic token sale transactions, these recent private placements were limited to investors operating outside of the U.S., and further include measures designed to prevent WLD sold outside the US from flowing back into the US, including, without limitation, restricting any resales of WLD to US persons or on digital asset trading platforms available to US persons.