A publicly traded company most investors have never heard of just added its name to a $52.5 million funding round for one of the more unusual projects in tech, a global network built to prove, one eyeball scan at a time, that the person on the other end of a transaction is actually human. Eightco Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ: ORBS) confirmed on today that it took part in World Foundation’s latest raise, led by Pantera Capital and joined by Bain Capital Crypto, Selini Capital, Susquehanna Crypto and other investors. The round landed as World Foundation marked three years since its Proof of Human network went live, a milestone that now includes more than 39 million people who have joined World Network and over 18 million verified through its Orb devices.
What makes Eightco worth watching is not the funding round itself but what sits behind it. As of July 26, 2026, the company’s holdings totaled approximately $391 million, spread across a $90 million indirect stake in OpenAI held through special purpose vehicles, an $18 million equity position in Beast Industries, a smaller $1 million stake in Mythical Games, 16,278 units of Ethereum, nearly 302 million Worldcoin tokens, and about $142 million in cash and stablecoins. The company counts Bitmine Immersion Technologies Inc. (NYSE: BMNR) among its institutional backers, alongside World Foundation, Pantera and several crypto focused investment firms.
Two voices framed the announcement. OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman described World ID as an effort to keep people, not machines, at the center of an increasingly automated future. Eightco board member and longtime Wall Street strategist Tom Lee pointed to a recent cut in Worldcoin’s daily token issuance, arguing it should ease the balance between supply and demand and support the token’s price over time.
That issuance change is part of a busier than usual news cycle around World and its partners. On July 21st, Grayscale filed paperwork with the Securities and Exchange Commission for what would be the first U.S. exchange traded fund tied to Worldcoin, aiming to list under the ticker GWLD (AMBCrypto). The same week, OpenAI rolled out a ChatGPT program aimed at small businesses, and Franklin Resources, Inc. (NYSE: BEN), operating under its Franklin Templeton brand, published research arguing that blockchain rails will become essential to machine to machine payments as AI agents proliferate. Days later, OpenAI announced a $20 billion data center project in Georgia designed to deliver 3.2 gigawatts of power in phases through 2032. And on July 24th, World’s three year token unlock period concluded, cutting the pace of new WLD entering circulation by roughly 43%, from about 5.1 million tokens a day to about 2.9 million.
Eightco’s pitch to investors rests on three trends it believes will define the next decade: artificial intelligence, digital identity and the creator economy. OpenAI accounts for roughly 23% of the company’s treasury, a bet that looks more substantial given that ChatGPT has already crossed 900 million weekly active users. Worldcoin makes up close to 28%, with Eightco holding an estimated 8% of the token’s circulating supply, reportedly the largest disclosed institutional position anywhere. The remaining creator economy slice, about 5%, comes through Beast Industries, the company built around YouTube personality MrBeast and his combined following of more than 500 million people across platforms.
None of this makes Eightco a conventional stock story. It is closer to a wrapper, a single ticker that gives ordinary investors indirect exposure to a handful of private companies and a volatile digital token they otherwise could not easily access. Whether that wrapper holds up depends on factors well outside the company’s control, from OpenAI’s path toward an eventual public listing to how regulators and the market ultimately treat a token designed to prove someone is not a robot.
