Crypto's next craze? Orbs that scan your eyeballs.

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

cryptocurrency enthusiasts gathered at an art gallery in downtown Manhattan. They were greeted by a scene from science fiction. At one end of the room was an open bar.

Across from it stood a loose array of gray pedestals, arranged like a futuristic Stonehenge, each displaying a metal sphere about the size of a bowling ball. The event was a launch party for Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project created by Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, and the crypto company he co-founded, Tools for Humanity. As music thrummed in the background, guests congregated around the shiny orbs, which looked like a cross between a giant eight ball and HAL 9000, the rogue computer in «2001: A Space Odyssey.» The gathering was a small step in what Tools for Humanity claims will be a world-changing project: to scan the eyeballs of all 8 billion humans, and then use that one-time ID to offer small allotments of cryptocurrency to support them in a world upended by artificial intelligence.

Every Worldcoin orb contains a camera designed to record images of a person's irises. The orbs convert those scans into bits of numerical code, which are supposed to serve as a new type of digital ID. In the short term, Tools for Humanity plans to generate revenue by offering its iris-based system as an alternative to security technologies such as CAPTCHA, the photographic test that is used to sort humans from spam accounts.