Eightco Holdings Inc. shares surged more than 3,000% Monday after the obscure e-commerce firm announced plans to build a treasury around Worldcoin—and secured a $20 million investment from crypto miner BitMine.
The stock hewed to its Friday closing price of $1.43 in pre-market hours and closed at $45.08. It surged as high as $83.12, earlier in the day, a more than 5,000% gain at the time.
“Everything the Foundation and Tools for Humanity have built has enabled us to be in this position,” Dan Ives, managing director at Wedbush Securities, told Decrypt. “We believe that World is significantly undervalued relative to the potential opportunity.”
Eightco also raised $250 million in a private placement to buy Worldcoin (WLD) tokens, calling it the first corporate treasury strategy built around the controversial digital identity project. Eightco also plans to change its Nasdaq ticker from OCTO to ORBS on September 11, 2025.
Worldcoin rose 49% Monday to $1.54, reaching a seven-month high, according to CoinGecko.
BitMine, which recently boosted its Ethereum holdings to more than two million ETH—worth roughly $9 billion—described the Eightco deal as its first “moonshot” investment.
Ives, who was also newly appointed chairman of Eightco, told Decrypt the move aligns with the company’s focus on digital identity, AI, and Worldcoin’s “Proof of Personhood” technology.
“I see Worldcoin as a tech infrastructure play, not a crypto investment. It’s the intersection of AI and crypto,” Ives said. “I wouldn’t be involved if this were just a token strategy. A key part of the AI revolution will be the authentication and trust layer—and that’s what World provides.”
While the treasury’s focus is on Worldcoin, Eightco acknowledged that it may also hold cash and Ethereum “as secondary reserve assets,” with Ives highlighting the company’s bullish sentiment toward the number one Proof-of-Stake blockchain, but said other cryptocurrencies could potentially be added later.
“We see ourselves as a sibling to Ethereum, and that’s potentially in the cards,” Ives said. “But our main focus is World.”
Worldcoin, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, launched in July 2023 as a digital identity system. Worldcoin has a total supply of 10 billion WLD Tokens. At the center of the Worldcoin ecosystem is the Orb, an iris-scanning device that verifies users as human and distributes WLD tokens. In October 2024, Worldcoin rebranded to World. In April, World unveiled its Orb in six major American cities: Atlanta, Austin, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, and San Francisco.
The project has faced scrutiny from regulators and privacy advocates in several countries over its biometric data practices, though the company says its zero-knowledge protocol keeps that information off-chain.
Worldcoin has registered nearly 16 million accounts in more than 45 countries, according to the company. In January, Worldcoin jumped 25% after President Donald Trump announced a $500 billion AI investment initiative by OpenAI, Oracle, and the Japanese conglomerate Softbank.