🟪 The devil isn’t in the details

Pondering one’s orb just got a little closer to home.

As the Blockworks team reported this week, Sam Altman’s Worldcoin officially launched in the US. 

There are a number of components here, but the headline-grabbing one, of course, is the ability for Americans to get their irises scanned in exchange for a handful of WLD. If you’re in Atlanta, Los Angeles, San Francisco and a few other US cities, the doors will eventually open, I guess. 

I know my colleague over at the Lightspeed newsletter, Jeff Albus, is hyperbullish on the prospect of projects like World/Worldcoin (finally) addressing the chronic issues around digital identity. I share that optimism, though whether a VC-founded coin is the right path remains a source of some skepticism.

Still, it’s a start.

What I’m curious about is whether World might be a fresh vector for people who might normally be averse to buying crypto to actually get their hands on some. What they do with it once in hand is, of course, a fair question. Still, so much of what is considered "mainstream adoption" today falls in the institutional category — that is, big banks and major investors plowing into either ETFs or the digital assets themselves. Retail — or, really, everyday people — feel more of an afterthought than ever.

This wasn’t always the case. Once upon a time, the chief ambition within crypto circles — really, bitcoin circles if we go back that far — was for average people to use these coins like the cash in their pocket. Be your own bank, as the saying went.

Does World represent a return to that ambition? One wonders. I’d like to think so. But as has so often been the case, the devil isn’t in the details — it’s in the behavior that, as much as folks in Silicon Valley wish they could, isn’t so controllable. It’s just as likely that these WLD accounts will gather digital dust or be consigned to the quick-sell bin once the first chance arrives.

Personally, I’d love to see a return to the era when the ultimate goal of crypto was to empower people without deep technical or financial know-hows. Here’s hoping we get there one day. 

— Michael McSweeney

Not-so-great news for Maple Story’s crypto spinoff, I’m afraid.

We’re 100 days into Trump’s pro-crypto administration. Let’s unpack what that means.

Movement had a bad, bad week, recapped helpfully by the 0xResearch team.

Empire covered an ever-so-spicy legal spat in the crypto HR/payroll ecosystem — yeah, you read that right.

SOL’s a bit…well, it’s a bit uncertain amid broader macroeconomic turbulence.

Happy birthday, Hal Finney!

1. Project Open makes its case to the SEC

2. Spot crypto trading to become ‘commoditized’ as Wall St. interest persists

3. MapleStory N launches in 2 weeks — but not in the USA

4. Kraken thwarts hacker’s ill-intentioned job application

5. Ellipsis Labs claims credit for mysterious top Solana DEX