Worldcoin gains renewed interest following launch of OpenAI Sora

Sam Altman’s Worldcoin has received renewed interest following the launch of OpenAI’s latest video tool, Sora.

Sora, OpenAI’s latest innovation in generative AI, leverages artificial intelligence to transform written descriptions into photo realistic video content.

The price of Worldcoin (WLD) reached $7.86 over the long weekend and is currently trading at $6.33. According to CoinGecko, the cryptocurrency currently has a fully diluted valuation of $63 billion, higher than that of the Solana blockchain.

Other AI-related cryptocurrencies have also seen its price increase following Sora’s launch. These include Fetch AI’s FET token, which has seen its price increase by 39.9% over the past week, and Singularity Studio’s AGIX token, which has seen its token price increase by 65%.

Alongside the renewed interest in AI tokens, cryptocurrency derivatives exchanges have also seen increased trading volumes following the President’s Day long weekend in the United States.

Over the past 24 hours, popular centralized exchange Binance has seen its trading volume soar by almost 50%. It currently has a perpetual futures trading volume of a little under $67 billion and a spot trading volume of almost $23 billion, according to CoinGecko.

Mark Smargon, the CEO of Fuse Network, an EVM-compatible layer-1 solution, told Blockworks that future options and derivatives generate the most volume in the financial system and that it should not be surprising that it also generates the most volume in DeFi.

“It is a form of leverage that is risky from one hand but overall brings efficiency to the market because of all the different trading activity it generates,” Smargon said.

However, David Siska, the head of research at Vega Protocol, a derivatives layer for Web3, notes that despite the growth in volume that dated futures have seen recently, this volume is still much dwarfed by the popularity of perpetual futures — which are only available on cryptocurrency exchanges.

“For example, Binance BTC perps have 17 billion 24h volume whereas dated BTC futures have 86 million in volume,” Siska said.

On-chain transfer volumes can also be correlated with Open Interest, Carlos Mercado, a data scientist at on-chain data analytics firm Flipside Crypto, explains.

“These futures accounts often use stablecoins and major tokens as collateral for their margin accounts and earn profit via arbitraging against on-chain DEXs,” Mercado said. “Coinalyze’s Bitcoin Open Interest similarly 2x’d from October 2023 ($7B) to now ($14B) despite being a different basket of tokens and covering different exchanges than my metric.”

Additionally, he notes that there is a broader institutional bull market that is building steam, visible across both on-chain and off-chain measures.

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