The basic native asset of the extremely contentious project Worldcoin, WDC, had its mainnet debut last week, and it was all over the financial media. As the dust settles, researchers from the top research company Kaiko notice a variety of unexpected facts concerning WDC’s initial trading days.
Low liquidity, market makers domination: Analysts deobfuscate Worldcoin (WDC) release economics
The WDC token’s introduction was exceptional in several ways. According to the study Breaking Down Worldcoin’s Launch by Kaiko’s Riyad Carey, almost the entire circulating quantity of Worldcoin (WDC) was lent to market makers, while just 1% of it was issued to consumers.
Carey monitored the WLD/USDT pairings’ performance on Binance, Bybit, Huobi, MEXC, and OKX; the WLD/USDC pair on Bybit; and the WLD/ETH pair on Uniswap. Surprisingly, Binance (BNB), the biggest exchange in the world, did not report the most liquidity for the pair.
Additionally, the overall amount of liquidity in pairings with WLD and stablecoins decreased more quickly: Despite a sizable loan of WDC to market makers, the net volume of liquidity (in USD) is 68% lower than that of Aptos (APT) and 37.5% lower than that of Arbitrum (ARB).
On Binance (BNB), the fourth trading session was nine times less active than the first one, as did the trade volume on other significant centralised exchanges, which also vanished quickly. On Huobi, the trade volume has remained constant during the four sessions that were examined.
The Worldcoin (WDC) token was made available to exchanges on Monday, July 24, 2023, as previously reported by U.Today. In different parts of the world, users can receive 25 WLD by having their eyes examined by special orbs.
The price of WLD increased by 55% within the first few hours of trade.
“Way to convince people to scan their eyes”
The researcher also discovered what appears to be a market manipulation, in addition to liquidity paradoxes and perplexing tokenomics. They discovered several “clusters,” or patterns of trade where a fictitious WLD holder buys and sells a comparable quantity of tokens without making any gains or losses.
Such manipulations must be credited to the idea of the product, which asks users to reveal their biometrics in exchange for a 25 WLD incentive that is given right away:
The launch indicates that the developers believed it was necessary to give its token a desirable dollar value. It can be difficult to persuade individuals to scan their eyes for 25 units of a token that doesn’t yet exist; if the token costs, say, $0.10, it becomes considerably more difficult.
With this dystopian plan, the developers of Worldcoin (WDC) hope to introduce the idea of “proof-of-personhood” as a safe and ZK-backed mechanism for anybody to demonstrate that they are a unique human being.
