According to a statement published on the ministry’s Facebook page on Wednesday, Kenya’s Ministry of the Interior has suspended the operations of Worldcoin, the identity crypto protocol co-founded by Sam Altman of OpenAI, while the nation’s financial, security, and data protection services look into the project’s legality and data protection.
“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,” said the statement signed by Minister Kithure Kindiki.
Worldcoin is working to develop a system for universal identification based on iris scans that may be used to demonstrate an agent’s humanness and individuality.This might be very important in a world where agents with artificial intelligence are involved in the economy, according to the initiative.However, the gathering of biometric information and the registration process in underdeveloped nations have come under fire, including charges of exploitation.According to a statement, many European regulatory bodies, including the Bavarian data protection body that oversees the company, have begun investigations into Worldcoin.Kenya, however, is the first nation to take things a step further and shut down the business totally while local authorities look into it.
Since the project’s introduction last week, those who had their irises scanned have obtained WLD tokens.According to statistics from CoinMarketCap, the token has increased 1.9% in the last day to reach $2.38 on cryptocurrency markets.By the time this article was published, Worldcoin had not reacted to any request for comment.