Eightco Holdings Inc. announced Monday it has priced a private placement offering that will raise approximately $270 million to fund what the company calls the first treasury strategy focused on Sam Altman’s World (WLD) cryptocurrency.

According to a new press release, the offering includes approximately 171.2 million shares of common stock priced at $1.46 per share, generating expected gross proceeds of about $250 million before fees and expenses.

Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities will act as chair of the company, and Funstrat’s Tom Lee has contributed $20 million in capital as well.

Said Ives in a CNBC interview,

“I mean, look, I’d say in this AI revolution, when you think about everything going on in terms of the trillions being spent, the biggest thing missing is identification and authentication. And you know what Sam and Alex and the team have built at World – when you think about these orbs, the iris scanning – in my opinion, this 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.”

An additional 13.7 million shares were issued to BitMine at the same price for $20 million in proceeds.

Said Lee,

“BitMine wants to support and back innovative projects that create value for the Ethereum network. As an ERC-20 native token, World is aligned with Ethereum. World’s unique zero-knowledge Proof of Human credential could be essential to future trust and safety between technology platforms and their billions of human users.”

MOZAYYX led the transaction, with participation from institutional investors including World Foundation, Discovery Capital Management, GAMA, FalconX, Kraken, Pantera, GSR, Coinfund, Occam Crest, Diametric and Brevan Howard. BitMine Immersion, which trades on NYSE American under ticker BMNR, contributed an additional $20 million investment.

The offering is expected to close Sept. 11, pending satisfaction of standard closing conditions and Nasdaq authorization. Eightco plans to use net proceeds to purchase WLD tokens as the company’s primary treasury reserve asset.

The company also intends to change its Nasdaq trading symbol to “ORBS,” effective Sept. 11.

WLD is up nearly 42% in the last 24 hours, trading for $1.50 at time of writing.