Historical replay · WLD/USD
Worldcoin's Post-Launch Slide (Summer 2023)
Worldcoin's WLD token launched with a chaotic opening spike, then spent five weeks grinding down nearly 50% as the market digested its unusual iris-scanning identity model.
Worldcoin, a project that verifies human identity through iris-scanning hardware ("Orbs") and issues its WLD token partly as a reward for that verification, launched trading on July 24, 2023 — one of that year's most-discussed and most-debated token launches given its unconventional biometric approach.
The opening minutes were chaotic even by crypto-listing standards: WLD's earliest trades printed as high as $5.29 against a reference price of $0.15, before settling near $2.16 by the end of the first day as real liquidity built up — a pattern similar to other thinly-traded new listings covered elsewhere on this site.
From that first-day close, WLD ground steadily lower over the following five weeks, closing near $1.14 by August 31 — a decline of roughly 47%, as initial hype gave way to ongoing debate over the project's privacy model and ordinary early-holder selling.
The decline wasn't driven by one single negative headline — it was a slower, sustained grind, the kind that's easy to miss day-to-day but adds up to a large move by the time anyone checks a weekly or monthly chart instead of a daily one.