Kenya Is World’s First Nation to Suspend Sam Altman’s Worldcoin
Kenya’s government is worried about Worldcoin, OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s identity-focused cryptocurrency.
The African nation’s Ministry of the Interior suspended Worldcoin’s operations in Kenya Wednesday (Aug. 2), amid a government investigation, according to a press release.
“The Government is concerned by the ongoing activities of an organization calling itself ‘WORLD COIN’ which is involved in the registration of citizens through the collection of eyeball/iris data,” Minister Kithure Kindiki said in the release on the ministry’s Facebook page.
Worldcoin has not replied to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
Worldcoin debuted late last month intending to capture participants’ biometrics using its proprietary Orb to provide them with a “proof of personhood” before issuing them Worldcoin tokens.
A Wednesday CoinDesk report noted that Kenya is the first country to suspend Worldcoin. It is not, however, the first country to express its reservations.
For example, the U.K’s Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) told PYMNTS it would be “making further inquiries” into Worldcoin soon after its launch.
Worldcoin responded by saying it complies with all data processing laws in the markets where it is available, including the U.K.
“From its inception, Worldcoin was designed to protect individual privacy,” the company said in an emailed statement to PYMNTS. “The project has implemented privacy-centric design and has built a robust privacy program, conducting a rigorous Data Protection Impact Assessment and responding timely to individual requests to delete their personal data.”
Worldcoin is launching as the two technologies at the heart of its mission — crypto and artificial intelligence (AI) — are “diverging in both public and commercial opinion, with AI making major strides while crypto backslides into uncertainty around its real-world utility.”
The lack of certainty around crypto in the U.S. has kept the company from launching the coin stateside, reportedly leaving it to shed the “crypto” moniker and rebrand as a digital firm.
“When we started thinking about this, we didn’t think it would end up as ‘world minus the U.S. coin’ and here we are,” Altman said last month. “I’d say there’s 95% of the world’s population not in the U.S. The U.S. does not make or break a project like this.”
For all PYMNTS crypto coverage, subscribe to the daily Crypto Newsletter.
The post Kenya Is World’s First Nation to Suspend Sam Altman’s Worldcoin first appeared on PYMNTS.com.