Two high-profile crypto projects are under renewed scrutiny, with TRUMP facing estimates that its team extracted up to $1.16 billion from buyers, while Worldcoin is drawing criticism over its biometric data practices even as it pitches Wall Street on its identity infrastructure.
On October 17, CryptoQuant founder Ki Young Ju wrote that the team behind the Official Trump token extracted between $779 million and $1.16 billion from buyers from January 2025 to October 2026. The confirmed figure of $779.4 million combines stablecoin outflows and TRUMP sent to labelled exchanges, while the upper bound adds roughly $381 million in tokens sent to unlabelled custody or external addresses. EmberCN separately counted 81.87 million TRUMP sent to exchanges including Binance and OKX over about eight months, worth about $249 million at an average price near $3.04. Reuters estimated the Trump family made approximately $616 million from the token out of roughly $1.2 billion in revenue, and that buyers lost more than $700 million as of April 30, 2026. TRUMP has a maximum supply of 1 billion, with 200 million available at launch and the rest released over 36 months. The project’s official site names CIC Digital LLC and Fight Fight Fight LLC as the entities managing the 80% creator allocation and receiving trading revenue. TRUMP traded near $1.70 on October 18, down 97.7% from its January 2025 high of $75, according to CoinMarketCap.
Worldcoin, meanwhile, launched its “World ID for Banking and Finance” suite on October 18 through Tools for Humanity, partnering with VanEck, Pantera Capital, and Bain Capital and integrating with Zoom to counter AI-driven deepfakes. The network markets proof-of-human verification as essential for an AI-heavy internet, but the rollout has revived criticism that the biometric database was built by offering crypto incentives to financially vulnerable people. Investigative and legal records highlight Kenya’s High Court ruling that Worldcoin violated the Data Protection Act and Chile’s Supreme Court finding constitutional violations, with Kenya ordering permanent deletion of data from over 350,000 citizens. Critics also point to institutional ties among Eightco Holdings (ORBS), Bitmine Immersion (BMNR), and MrBeast’s Beast Industries, arguing that retail participants supplied biometric data while value accrues to financial backers. WLD traded around $0.478 on October 19, with open interest down 5.1% and funding negative; DeFiLlama lists about 3.819 billion WLD circulating, and analysts estimate about 1.02 billion WLD in unlocks over the next 12 months, worth roughly $500 million at current prices.
The separate controversies illustrate how token economics and identity infrastructure are increasingly drawing attention from regulators, analysts, and institutional investors.
