Worldcoin, a new startup that’s attracted $25M in funding from big-name investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Coinbase and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman is offering users free crypto if they confirm their identities by taking an iris scan.

Why should we care?
WorldCoin is pitching its free crypto offering as a financial access play. “Cryptocurrency is a very powerful thing,” Alex Blania, Worldcoin’s CEO, said in an interview. “It will widen the boundaries of the economy in general and give many people access.” To perform the iris scan, the company is sending orb-shaped devices to users. The image is encrypted and becomes a unique code, and the original data is deleted to protect customers’ privacy. Once that happens, users can get a share of Worldcoin’s Ethereum-based cryptocurrency. Keeping with the mission of broadening access to crypto, the company says one of the rationales for the launch of the product is the high costs of crypto transactions. “Bitcoin isn’t scalable to billions of people,” Blania said in an interview. “As we see today, it’s very expensive because transactions are slow.”