Daniel Ives, Wedbush Securities
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives is joining a brand new company focused on accumulating Worldcoin (WLD), the native token of the blockchain utilized in Open AI creator Sam Altman’s biometric identity verification startup, World.
Eightco Holdings, a tiny company that currently trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker “OCTO,” announced Monday that Ives, Wedbush’s global head of technology research, is now chairman of the board of directors. It also announced a $250 million private placement to implement a buying strategy around Worldcoin as its principal treasury asset.
“As someone that is so obsessed with the AI revolution and the long run of tech, I view World as really the de facto standard for authentication and identification in the long run world of AI,” Ives told CNBC. “I’d not be doing this initiative if it was only a cookie cutter token strategy.”
The offering is predicted to shut on or around Sept. 11, at which point it plans to alter its ticker to “ORBS.”
Ives’ move is analogous to 1 made by one other widely-followed Wall Street forecaster, Tom Lee of Fundstrat, who in June joined the ether accumulator BitMine Immersion Technologies as chairman. BitMine shares have rocked greater than 800% since Lee announced his involvement.
That company also made a $20 million strategic investment in Eightco, it announced Monday, marking the beginning of its “Moonshot” technique to back daring ideas that strengthen Ethereum’s ecosystem.
Given the more crypto-friendly regulatory environment this 12 months, more public firms have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of using debt financing and equity sales to purchase crypto to carry on their balance sheet to try to extend shareholder returns. Firms with high-profile backers like Fundstrat’s Lee and tech billionaire Peter Thiel (who has a stake in each ether-focused firms BitMine and Ethzilla) have been holding up higher within the recent crypto pullback.
Ives, known for his daring street calls (and fashion decisions) also runs the Dan Ives Wedbush AI Revolution ETF (IVES), which launched earlier in the summertime with a deal with software and chips, and has said tech can be in a bull marketplace for the following two to 3 years.
Increasingly, firms pursuing crypto treasury strategies are looking further out on the chance spectrum of crypto, beyond bitcoin, hoping for even greater gains. For instance, DeFi Development Corp launched in April with a deal with accumulating Solana’s SOL token, and a little-known Canadian vape company called CEA Industries announced a Binance Coin (BNB) accumulation plan in July.
Altman’s World enterprise goals to authenticate actual humans on its network given the acceleration of the variety of threats from artificial intelligence, reminiscent of deepfakes. The project provides users with a “World ID” for anonymous sign-ins and rewards them with its Worldcoin cryptocurrency.
“Because the AI infrastructure and [large language models] are built out without true identification and proof of human, it is a limiting consider the expansion of AI for the approaching years,” Ives said. “I view the entire crypto world going increasingly toward a deal with blockchain, and the way are you going to discover humans … in a future where robots are going to play a significant role in physical AI?”
His comments on the necessity for a digital identity verification system echo those made by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who has said in his annual letter this 12 months that someday “tokenized funds,” or funds represented on a blockchain network like Ethereum, “will turn out to be as familiar to investors as ETFs — provided we crack one critical problem: identity verification.”
Worldcoin launched in 2023 and has a market cap of about $1 billion, in comparison with bitcoin’s roughly $2 trillion and ether’s $518 billion, in line with CoinGecko.
