Good morning. Here is one to wake up with: a small Nasdaq-listed company called Eightco Holdings (ticker: ORBS) just gave us a look inside its piggy bank, and the numbers tell a story about where the internet is heading.
As of mid-May, Eightco is sitting on about $340 million in total assets. The mix is unusual. There is $90 million tied to OpenAI shares, held indirectly through what is called an SPV. Think of an SPV, or special purpose vehicle, as a side pocket fund that lets investors buy into private companies they normally could not touch. There is also $18 million in MrBeast's company, Beast Industries, plus a small stake in Mythical Games.
The crypto side is where it gets interesting. Eightco holds 11,068 Ether and a huge 283 million Worldcoin tokens. Worldcoin, or WLD, is the project from Sam Altman that scans people's eyeballs to prove they are human online. The rest, about $129 million, is plain cash and stablecoins.
Why does a company tie itself to eyeball scans? Because the internet has a fake people problem. New numbers cited by Eightco show bots and AI accounts make up 75% of trading on Polymarket, 53% of all web traffic, and 47% of emails. Almost half of US stock trading is done by machines, not humans. If you cannot tell who is real online, services that prove you are a person become valuable.
That is the bet. OpenAI is reportedly building a social network that needs to filter out bots. Worldcoin wants to be the ID layer for that world. Eightco is buying both ends of that pipe.
One quick note. WLD was priced at 27 cents when Eightco counted its holdings. The token has been bumpy, so the headline number moves with the market.
Why it matters: Eightco is one of the only public stocks giving everyday investors a side door into OpenAI and the messy fight to prove humans from machines online.