Arthur Hayes' investment firm Maelstrom has predicted that Worldcoin's WLD token could surge to as high as $5 per token over the next few months, positioning it as a crypto proxy for the broader artificial intelligence boom — a potential gain of roughly 900% from its current trading price of around $0.50.
"The AI mega IPOs are coming — and it appears the market has overlooked one of the cleanest proxies," said Maelstrom researcher Lukas Ruppert on Wednesday.
The AI sector has been in full swing in the United States. OpenAI confidentially filed its IPO prospectus with the SEC on May 22, targeting a public debut in September 2026, with the firm aiming to raise $60 billion at a potential valuation of up to $1 trillion. Meanwhile, competitor Anthropic confidentially filed its draft prospectus on Monday after announcing on May 28 that it was valued at $965 billion following a fresh $65 billion funding round.
US stock markets, including the S&P 500, have reached record highs this week, driven largely by a surge in AI and memory storage company shares such as SanDisk, Micron, Seagate, and Western Digital.
However, Ruppert argues that this rally has not been reflected in the price of WLD, though company purchasing activity and a change in the token unlock schedule could serve as catalysts for a price recovery.
WLD is the native token underpinning Worldcoin, a crypto project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman that aims to create a global digital identity and financial network capable of distinguishing real humans from AI bots.
WLD prices have been downtrending since February, with losses accelerating in March following a private sale of tokens, of which $25 million is locked for six months. To protect against WLD prices falling before their tokens unlock, buyers hedged by shorting the token on perpetual futures markets — what Ruppert described as a "textbook short overhang."
Ruppert identified two potential catalysts that could reverse this mechanical and temporary overhang. First, Eightco (ORBS), a small publicly traded company that has already accumulated 283 million WLD tokens, has around $144 million in cash on its balance sheet. If the company deploys that cash to buy more of the heavily shorted tokens, it could "trigger a reflexive loop," sending prices higher. Second, Worldcoin's token unlock schedule — which releases tokens to the market every day — is set to drop by 43% on July 24, potentially cutting a major source of selling pressure.
"Capital is aggressively chasing Anthropic and OpenAI exposure," said Ruppert. He noted that while those valuations sit in the hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, WLD trades at a $2 billion unlocked market cap — "a small cap, when it comes to AI valuations" — labeling the situation an "asymmetric upside."
The analyst note comes as WLD is currently the best-performing crypto asset in the top 100 tokens by market capitalization, having surged approximately 60% over the past week. "WLD doesn't move often — but when it does, it moves aggressively," Ruppert said, with Maelstrom setting a price target of $5 by August.
Why it matters
Both potential price catalysts identified by Maelstrom have concrete, near-term triggers: a possible large purchase by Eightco and a scheduled 43% reduction in daily token unlocks on July 24, meaning the window for the described dynamics is relatively short.
A 'short overhang' — where buyers of discounted tokens hedge by shorting the same asset on futures markets — can create sustained downward price pressure that is mechanical and temporary rather than driven by changes in the project's fundamentals.
The $2 billion 'unlocked market cap' figure cited in the article reflects only the tokens currently in circulation, not the total token supply, which is a distinction readers should keep in mind when comparing WLD's size to broader AI company valuations.
