Daniel Ives, Wedbush Securities
Scott Mlyn | CNBC
Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives is joining a new company focused on accumulating Worldcoin (WLD), the native token of the blockchain used in Open AI creator Sam Altman’s biometric identity verification startup, World.
Eightco Holdings, a tiny company that currently trades on the Nasdaq under the ticker “OCTO,” announced Monday that Ives, Wedbush’s global head of technology research, is now chairman of the board of directors. It also announced a $250 million private placement to implement a buying strategy around Worldcoin as its main treasury asset.
“As someone that’s so passionate about the AI revolution and the future of tech, I view World as really the de facto standard for authentication and identification in the future world of AI,” Ives told CNBC. “I would not be doing this initiative if it was just a cookie cutter token strategy.”
The offering is expected to close on or around Sept. 11, at which point it plans to change its ticker to “ORBS.”
Ives’ move is similar to one made by another widely-followed Wall Street forecaster, Tom Lee of Fundstrat, who in June joined the ether accumulator BitMine Immersion Technologies as chairman. BitMine shares have rocked more than 800% since Lee announced his involvement.
That company also made a $20 million strategic investment in Eightco, it announced Monday, marking the start of its “Moonshot” strategy to back bold ideas that strengthen Ethereum’s ecosystem.
Given the more crypto-friendly regulatory environment this year, more public companies have adopted the MicroStrategy playbook of using debt financing and equity sales to buy crypto to hold on their balance sheet to try to increase shareholder returns. Companies with high-profile backers like Fundstrat’s Lee and tech billionaire Peter Thiel (who has a stake in both ether-focused companies BitMine and Ethzilla) have been holding up better in the recent crypto pullback.
Ives, known for his bold street calls (and fashion choices) also runs the Dan Ives Wedbush AI Revolution ETF (IVES), which launched earlier in the summer with a focus on software and chips, and has said tech will be in a bull market for the next two to three years.
Increasingly, companies pursuing crypto treasury strategies are looking further out on the risk spectrum of crypto, beyond bitcoin, hoping for even bigger gains. For example, DeFi Development Corp launched in April with a focus on accumulating Solana’s SOL token, and a little-known Canadian vape company called CEA Industries announced a Binance Coin (BNB) accumulation plan in July.
Altman’s World venture aims to authenticate actual humans on its network given the acceleration of the number of threats from artificial intelligence, such as deepfakes. The project provides users with a “World ID” for anonymous sign-ins and rewards them with its Worldcoin cryptocurrency.
“As the AI infrastructure and [large language models] are built out without true identification and proof of human, it’s a limiting factor in the growth of AI for the coming years,” Ives said. “I view the whole crypto world going more and more toward a focus on blockchain, and how are you going to identify humans … in a future where robots are going to play a major role in physical AI?”
His comments on the need for a digital identity verification system echo those made by BlackRock CEO Larry Fink who has said in his annual letter this year that one day “tokenized funds,” or funds represented on a blockchain network like Ethereum, “will become as familiar to investors as ETFs — provided we crack one critical problem: identity verification.”
Worldcoin launched in 2023 and has a market cap of about $1 billion, compared to bitcoin’s roughly $2 trillion and ether’s $518 billion, according to CoinGecko.
