Worldcoin Sold 117 Million Tokens for $35M in USDC. Then Deposited It All to Circle for Cash.
On March 21, World Assets — the entity behind Sam Altman's Worldcoin — sold 117 million WLD tokens in an OTC deal with Binance and FalconX. The price: roughly $0.30 per token. The payment: $35 million in USDC. Days later, 35.8 million USDC was deposited directly to Circle — the standard route for converting stablecoins to fiat.
This wasn't a one-off. Over the past week, Worldcoin closed $65 million in OTC sales with four counterparties. Of that total, $25 million is subject to a six-month lockup. The rest is liquid and heading for bank accounts.
The Two-Year Pattern
Worldcoin has been running this playbook for roughly two years, selling WLD through market makers like Flow Traders and Wintermute every few days. The token is down 97% from its $11.70 all-time high in March 2024. Current price: about $0.27. The project raised $250 million in a 2023 funding round led by Blockchain Capital. Two years later, the token trades below the OTC sale price.
And it's about to get worse. Over 52% of total WLD supply is projected to unlock in July 2026 — one of the largest proportional token unlocks in crypto history. Team members and investors follow a revised vesting schedule where approximately 80% of tokens vest over five years and the remainder over three years, with emissions ongoing since July 2024.
USDC as the Exit Ramp
The stablecoin angle here is the one nobody's writing about. When a crypto project needs to convert tokens to real money at scale, the path runs through USDC and Circle almost every time. Not bank wires. Not USDT to Tether's offshore accounts. USDC to Circle to a US bank account. That's the institutional-grade off-ramp.
Worldcoin's 35.8 million USDC deposit to Circle is a $35.8 million cash-out processed through what is effectively a regulated payment rail. Circle redeems the USDC, burns the tokens, and wires dollars. The process takes 1-2 business days. No bank questions why a "cryptocurrency project" is receiving $35 million — because the money comes from Circle, a regulated financial institution.
What This Means for USDC's Role
Circle's pitch has always been that USDC is a payment stablecoin. But the biggest use case for large USDC transactions isn't payments — it's liquidation. When VCs exit positions, when projects sell treasuries, when funds rebalance, USDC is the bridge between crypto tokens and bank accounts. Worldcoin's repeated pattern of WLD → OTC → USDC → Circle → fiat is the clearest illustration of how this pipeline works in practice.
That's not a criticism. Infrastructure that lets projects convert illiquid tokens to dollars efficiently is genuinely useful. But it does raise a question about USDC's long-term revenue model. Circle earns interest on the reserves backing USDC. If a significant portion of USDC volume is just transient — held for hours between an OTC trade and a Circle redemption — then the reserves backing those tokens are temporary too. The money comes in, gets redeemed, and leaves. Circle clips the yield for a day.
Worldcoin will keep selling. The July unlock will flood the market with new supply. And every WLD-to-dollars conversion will likely run through the same USDC-to-Circle pipeline. For stablecoin watchers, the interesting metric isn't Worldcoin's token price — it's how much USDC gets minted and burned in the process.