As artificial intelligence bots and deepfakes make it harder to tell who is real and who isn’t, crypto firms are jockeying to sell potential solutions.
The internet is an increasingly murky space. A report from the generative voice platform Resemble AI indicates scammers stole $347.2 million via deepfakes in the second quarter of 2025 alone. Videos across the web show doctored footage of politicians, CEOs, and celebrities like Brad Pitt and Tom Hanks promoting fraudulent crypto investments, making personalized romantic pleas, and attempting to initiate targeted wire transfers. Meanwhile, everyone’s feeds are increasingly filled with AI-generated slop that seems all too real as platforms like OpenAI’s Sora 2 rapidly advance. So what’s the solution? What is to be done? Well, if you ask people in the crypto community, the solution is to throw some more crypto at the problem.
Sam Altman wants to tackle online identification with his controversial crypto project World, which relies on orb-shaped devices that scan people’s irises to create unique, encrypted digital codes designed to allow individuals to authenticate themselves online. The project, formerly known as Worldcoin, maintains that each user’s biometric data is encrypted and stored only on their personal device, but it has still raised privacy concerns from governments and concerned citizens around the globe.
World now appears to have some competition: The crypto wallet firm Ledger introduced its new Nano Gen5 model this week, but the company is no longer billing the product as a hardware wallet.
