Eightco Chair Dan Ives Calls Sam Altman's World Project The 'Intersection Of AI And Crypto,' Compares It To Nvidia, Palantir

Wall Street tech analyst Dan Ives expressed on Monday his excitement and vision for his new role as chairman of Eightco Holdings Inc. OCTO, a firm that has adopted World (WLD) as its primary reserve asset.

‘Intersection’ Of AI And Crypto

During an interview with CNBC, Ives, a senior research analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he was “excited” to take over the role, given his “passion” for AI and the potential of the decentralized identity verification project.

“When you think about these Orb devices, the iris scanning, in my opinion, is going to be the de facto standard when we think about separating from bots, identifying humans. And ultimately, this is really more of an infrastructure play. It’s really the intersection of AI and crypto,” Ives said.

Ives Compares World To Nvidia, Palantir

He argued that despite the trillions being poured into large language models and data centers, the future of AI will be determined by authentication and identification.

Ives compared the current state of the project to where Nvidia Corp. NVDA and Palantir Technologies Inc. PLTR were in 2022, suggesting a similar trajectory of growth and influence.

EightCo raised $250 million through a private placement to adopt WLD as its primary treasury reserve asset.

Tom Lee-led Bitmine Immersion Technologies Inc. BMNR also disclosed a $20 million investment into the company as the first "Moonshot" initiative in its Ethereum ETH/USD ecosystem expansion plan.

World’s Privacy Concerns

World, formerly Worldcoin, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is an identity verification project that captures people’s irises to confirm their humanness and build a digital ID, allowing them to receive free WLD tokens. However, it has courted controversy over personal data privacy concerns and is currently outlawed in Hong Kong, Kenya, and Spain. The project debuted in the U.S. earlier this year.

To address the privacy concerns, World implemented a personal custody feature that ensures users' data remains on their devices and not with World or any third party.

Price Action: At the time of writing, WLD was exchanging hands at $1.68, up 45% in the last 24 hours, according to data from Benzinga Pro. Shares of Eightco fell 5.94% in after-hours trading after exploding 3008.97% to $45.08 during the regular trading session.

As of this writing, the stock demonstrated a moderately high Momentum score. Visit Benzinga Edge Stock Rankings to compare it with how BitMine, the world’s biggest ETH treasury company.

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Disclaimer: This content was partially produced with the help of Benzinga Neuro and was reviewed and published by Benzinga editors.