Sam Altman seems to be the latest founder who can drive crypto prices even when he has nothing to do with them. 

The biometric ID project Worldcoin’s WLD token is pumping—but apparently not because of anything to do with the project itself. 

Instead, Worldcoin’s rise seems to be tied to the developments around its founder Sam Altman. Altman is also the CEO of OpenAI, one of the foremost and most prominent companies in the rapidly-accelerating generative AI industry. 

According to CoinGecko, WLD was trading at $3.24 at the start of the Friday but jumped 141% to $7.81 Monday before settling at $7.33 at the time of publication.

There is only one problem—nothing actually happened with Worldcoin, the tech behind it, or any of its ambitions in that span. It’s hard to see Worldcoin’s announcement of a bug bounty program resulting in this kind of increase. It looks like the price increase may instead be related to OpenAI’s debut of Sora, a widely-covered text-to-video AI product. 

Figurehead-Led Asset Class

Crypto consumers have long had a problem with putting too much value on a founder or figurehead rather than on the actual products themselves. Look no further than tokens like DOGE pumping whenever Elon Musk tweeted about it, or even the way that FTX’s founder Sam Bankman-Fried was held up as the face of crypto before it all came crashing down. 

This isn’t the first time (or the second) that WLD has moved in relation to developments involving Altman. It’s worth repeating that Worldcoin and OpenAI have nothing to do with each other on a technological level outside of Altman’s involvement in both, and even then he isn’t involved in Worldcoin’s day-to-day operations.  

When Altman was deposed as CEO of OpenAI in November, WLD’s price dipped 12%and then rebounded 20% days later when news reports suggested he would be reinstated at the company, which he ultimately was. 

Again, nothing about the actual scope or technology of Worldcoin changed in that time, suggesting the token’s price may be pegged more to Altman’s fortunes than to the project itself. 

Read more: Sam Altman’s Worldcoin Launches Community Grants Program