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Wall Street tech analyst Dan Ives expressed on Monday his excitement and vision for his new role as chairman of Eightco Holdings Inc. (NASDAQ:OCTO), a firm that has adopted World (WLD) as its primary reserve asset.

During an interview with CNBC, Ives, a senior research analyst at Wedbush Securities, said he was “excited” to take over the role, given his “passion” for AI and the potential of the decentralized identity verification project.

“When you think about these Orb devices, the iris scanning, in my opinion, is going to be the de facto standard when we think about separating from bots, identifying humans. And ultimately, this is really more of an infrastructure play. It’s really the intersection of AI and crypto,” Ives said.

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He argued that despite the trillions being poured into large language models and data centers, the future of AI will be determined by authentication and identification.

Ives compared the current state of the project to where Nvidia Corp. (NASDAQ:NVDA) and Palantir Technologies Inc. (NASDAQ:PLTR) were in 2022, suggesting a similar trajectory of growth and influence.

EightCo raised $250 million through a private placement to adopt WLD as its primary treasury reserve asset.

Tom Lee-led Bitmine Immersion Technologies Inc. (AMEX:BMNR) also disclosed a $20 million investment into the company as the first “Moonshot” initiative in its Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) ecosystem expansion plan.

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World, formerly Worldcoin, co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, is an identity verification project that captures people’s irises to confirm their humanness and build a digital ID, allowing them to receive free WLD tokens. However, it has courted controversy over personal data privacy concerns and is currently outlawed in Hong Kong, Kenya, and Spain. The project debuted in the U.S. earlier this year.

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To address the privacy concerns, World implemented a personal custody feature that ensures users’ data remains on their devices and not with World or any third party.

Photo Courtesy: CryptoFX on Shutterstock.com

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This article Eightco Chair Dan Ives Calls Sam Altman’s World Project The ‘Intersection Of AI And Crypto,’ Compares It To Nvidia, Palantir originally appeared on Benzinga.com