Daniel Ives, Wedbush Securities
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives is becoming a member of a brand new company centered 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 at the moment trades on the Nasdaq below the ticker “OCTO,” introduced Monday that Ives, Wedbush’s international head of expertise analysis, is now chairman of the board of administrators. It additionally introduced a $250 million personal placement to implement a shopping for technique round Worldcoin as its most important treasury asset.
“As someone that’s so passionate about the AI revolution and the future of tech, I view World as really the de facto standard for authentication and identification in the future world of AI,” Ives advised CNBC. “I would not be doing this initiative if it was just a cookie cutter token strategy.”
The providing is anticipated to shut on or round Sept. 11, at which level it plans to change its ticker to “ORBS.”
Ives’ transfer is comparable to one 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 introduced his involvement.
That company additionally made a $20 million strategic funding in Eightco, it introduced Monday, marking the beginning of its “Moonshot” technique to again daring concepts that strengthen Ethereum’s ecosystem.
Given the extra crypto-friendly regulatory environment this yr, extra public firms have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of utilizing debt financing and fairness gross sales to buy crypto to maintain on their steadiness sheet to attempt to enhance shareholder returns. Companies 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 better within the current crypto pullback.
Ives, identified for his daring road calls (and fashion choices) additionally runs the Dan Ives Wedbush AI Revolution ETF (IVES), which launched earlier in the summer with a deal with software program and chips, and has mentioned tech will be in a bull market for the next two to three years.
Increasingly, firms pursuing crypto treasury methods are trying additional out on the chance spectrum of crypto, past bitcoin, hoping for even greater good points. For instance, DeFi Development Corp launched in April with a deal with accumulating Solana’s SOL token, and a little-known Canadian vape company referred to as CEA Industries announced a Binance Coin (BNB) accumulation plan in July.
Altman’s World enterprise goals to authenticate precise people on its community given the acceleration of the quantity of threats from synthetic intelligence, comparable to deepfakes. The venture offers customers with a “World ID” for nameless sign-ins and rewards them with its Worldcoin cryptocurrency.
“As the AI infrastructure and [large language models] are built out without true identification and proof of human, it’s a limiting factor in the growth of AI for the coming years,” Ives mentioned. “I view the whole crypto world going more and more toward a focus on blockchain, and how are you going to identify humans … in a future where robots are going to play a major role in physical AI?”
His feedback on the necessity for a digital id verification system echo these made by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who has mentioned in his annual letter this yr that someday “tokenized funds,” or funds represented on a blockchain community like Ethereum, “will become 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 contrast to bitcoin’s roughly $2 trillion and ether’s $518 billion, in accordance to CoinGecko.