Kenya’s Ministry of the Interior has suspended the operations of Worldcoin, the identity crypto protocol co-founded by OpenAI’s Sam Altman, as the country’s financial, security, and data protection services investigate the legitimacy and data protection of the project. According to a statement posted on the ministry’s Facebook page, Minister Kithure Kindiki said, 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.
Worldcoin is attempting to create a global identification mechanism based on iris scans, which can be used to prove that an agent is human and unique. The project has been met with criticism, including accusations of exploitation, as users that have had their irises scanned have received WLD tokens since the project’s launch last week. The token has risen 1.9% to $2.38 on crypto exchanges in the past 24 hours.
In addition to the suspension in Kenya, several European regulators have also started investigations into Worldcoin, including the Bavarian data protection office that supervises the firm. Worldcoin had not responded to CoinDesk’s request for comment by the time of publication.