Apr 12, 2026; Bristol, Tennessee, USA; Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson (5) at Bristol Motor Speedway. Mandatory Credit: Randy Sartin-Imagn Images Through eight Cup Series races, five different drivers have been the first to the checkers and positioned their teams nicely at the top of the standings.
Reigning series champion Kyle Larson is hoping it’s his turn to join that list Sunday at the AdventHealth 400 at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan.
In its effort to crown a championship by creating more competition in every race instead of a Game 7 scenario for just four drivers, NASCAR scrapped its system and revisited the “Chase” format reminiscent of 2004’s Chase for the Nextel Cup, which had 10 drivers competing in a 10-race playoff.
Some variations made their way into the new 16-race postseason, but the most significant is the 55-point reward to each race winner, a 15-point bump from 2025.
Though five drivers have won a race so far, 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick has been victorious in half, owning four total victories to give him a 62-point advantage over second-place Ryan Blaney.
Winning mattered a lot in 2025. First, it was a “win and you’re in” the playoffs, then it was tacking on postseason points with another. Finally, winning in the final three stages advanced a driver to the next one.
However, winning matters even more now and can create a gap from the pack from Race 1 to Race 36, even after a lone 26-race reset that favors the points leader.
Win a lot and a hot shoe can be in Reddick’s perch, sitting pretty in the catbird seat.
Denny Hamlin, Bristol first-time victor Ty Gibbs and Chase Elliott occupy third through fifth, which leads to the first non-winner in sixth place, Larson.
Hamlin arrives at Kansas as one of the betting favorites, but Larson appears on a quest because the Hendrick Motorsports pilot has yet to end a race as the top dog on a Cup Series Sunday.
It’s been a minute since grabbing the checkers.
Larson finds himself in a unique position Sunday: It marks the final time this regular season where he is a defending race winner. The Elk Grove, Calif., product also won at Homestead-Miami (this season’s finale) in March of 2025 and Bristol last spring.
“I feel like we’re really close, like we could have won four to five races in this time span of not winning, maybe even more,” said Larson, who has 260 points and is second to Blaney with 72 stage points. “It’s kind of wild to think it’s been almost a year since I’ve won because I don’t feel like we’re that bad. … It just hasn’t happened.”
Larson, 33, said last November’s championship in the Arizona desert made his current 32-race winless streak seem like no big deal, saying, “Ultimately, celebrating the championship in Phoenix felt like a win in a lot of ways.”
The two-time series champ does not lead single-digit laps at Kansas. Larson runs the point in chunks and is usually the guy being chased at the leaderboard’s perch.
Larson led 221 laps a year ago in his last victory and is a three-time winner at the 1.5-mile track in the past nine races.
Since 2021, his No. 5 Chevy has paced 761 circuits there, more than double that of Hamlin (337), the next highest leader.
But just leading the final one Sunday will be fulfilling.
–Field Level Media
Apr 12, 2026; Bristol, Tennessee, USA; Hendrick Motorsports driver Kyle Larson (5) at Bristol Motor Speedway. Mandatory Credit: Randy Sartin-Imagn Images Through eight Cup Series races, five different drivers have been the first to the checkers and positioned their teams nicely at the top of the standings.
Reigning series champion Kyle Larson is hoping it’s his turn to join that list Sunday at the AdventHealth 400 at Kansas Speedway in Kansas City, Kan.
In its effort to crown a championship by creating more competition in every race instead of a Game 7 scenario for just four drivers, NASCAR scrapped its system and revisited the “Chase” format reminiscent of 2004’s Chase for the Nextel Cup, which had 10 drivers competing in a 10-race playoff.
Some variations made their way into the new 16-race postseason, but the most significant is the 55-point reward to each race winner, a 15-point bump from 2025.
Though five drivers have won a race so far, 23XI Racing’s Tyler Reddick has been victorious in half, owning four total victories to give him a 62-point advantage over second-place Ryan Blaney.
Winning mattered a lot in 2025. First, it was a “win and you’re in” the playoffs, then it was tacking on postseason points with another. Finally, winning in the final three stages advanced a driver to the next one.
However, winning matters even more now and can create a gap from the pack from Race 1 to Race 36, even after a lone 26-race reset that favors the points leader.
Win a lot and a hot shoe can be in Reddick’s perch, sitting pretty in the catbird seat.
Denny Hamlin, Bristol first-time victor Ty Gibbs and Chase Elliott occupy third through fifth, which leads to the first non-winner in sixth place, Larson.
Hamlin arrives at Kansas as one of the betting favorites, but Larson appears on a quest because the Hendrick Motorsports pilot has yet to end a race as the top dog on a Cup Series Sunday.
It’s been a minute since grabbing the checkers.
Larson finds himself in a unique position Sunday: It marks the final time this regular season where he is a defending race winner. The Elk Grove, Calif., product also won at Homestead-Miami (this season’s finale) in March of 2025 and Bristol last spring.
“I feel like we’re really close, like we could have won four to five races in this time span of not winning, maybe even more,” said Larson, who has 260 points and is second to Blaney with 72 stage points. “It’s kind of wild to think it’s been almost a year since I’ve won because I don’t feel like we’re that bad. … It just hasn’t happened.”
Larson, 33, said last November’s championship in the Arizona desert made his current 32-race winless streak seem like no big deal, saying, “Ultimately, celebrating the championship in Phoenix felt like a win in a lot of ways.”
The two-time series champ does not lead single-digit laps at Kansas. Larson runs the point in chunks and is usually the guy being chased at the leaderboard’s perch.
Larson led 221 laps a year ago in his last victory and is a three-time winner at the 1.5-mile track in the past nine races.
Since 2021, his No. 5 Chevy has paced 761 circuits there, more than double that of Hamlin (337), the next highest leader.
But just leading the final one Sunday will be fulfilling.
–Field Level Media

![Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder. | TechCrunch
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.
World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
Image Credits:World
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
Image Credits:World
However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
#Sam #Altmans #project #World #scale #human #verification #empire #stop #Tinder #TechCrunchDocuSign,sam altman,Tinder,World,Worldcoin,zoom Sam Altman’s project World looks to scale its human verification empire. First stop: Tinder. | TechCrunch
At a trendy venue near the San Francisco pier, Sam Altman’s verification project World celebrated its next evolution and rapid expansion of its ambitions. And it’s starting with Tinder.
Tools for Humanity (TFH), the company behind the World project, announced Friday plans to integrate its verification tech into dating apps, event and concert ticketing systems, business organizations, email, and other arenas of public life.
“The world is getting close to very powerful AI, and this is doing a lot of wonderful things,” said Altman, speaking before a packed crowd at The Midway. “We are also heading to a world now where there’s going to be more stuff generated by AI than by humans,” he added. “I’m sure many of you [have had moments] where you’re like, ‘Am I interacting with an AI or a person, or how much of each, and how do I know?”
World (formerly Worldcoin) distinguishes itself from many of its ID verification peers by offering the ability to verify that a real, living human is using a digital service while still protecting that person’s anonymity. There is some complex cryptographic alchemy behind this (something called “zero-knowledge proof-based authentication”). The upshot: The company is creating what it calls “proof of human” tools, which are mechanisms that can verify human activity in a world rife with AI agents and bots.
Its chief tool for verification is a spherical digital reader called the Orb that scans a user’s eyes, converting their iris into a unique and anonymous cryptographic identifier (known as a verified World ID). This can then be used to access World’s services, although users can also access World’s app without one.
Altman kept his remarks brief on Friday (TFH’s co-founder and CEO, Alex Blania, was absent due to a last-minute hand surgery, Altman said). He then turned much of the presentation over to World’s chief product officer, Tiago Sada, and his team.
Sada explained that World was launching the newest version of its app (the last version was launched at an event in December), along with a plethora of new integrations for its technology.
World has been preparing, for some time, to deploy a verification service for dating apps — most notably, Tinder. Last year, Tinder launched a World ID pilot program in Japan. That pilot was apparently a success because World announced that Tinder would be launching its verification integration in global markets —including the U.S. The program integrates a World ID emblem into the profiles of users who have gone through its verification processes, thus authenticating them as a real person.
Image Credits:World
World is also courting the entertainment industry by launching a new feature called Concert Kit, where musical artists can reserve a certain number of concert tickets for World ID-verified humans. This is designed to ensure that fans are safe from scalpers who often use automated ticket-buying bots to scarf up seats. Concert Kit is compatible with major ticketing systems, including Ticketmaster and Eventbrite, and the company is promoting it via partnerships with 30 Seconds to Mars and Bruno Mars — both of whom plan to use it for their upcoming tours.
The event was full of many other announcements, including some aimed at businesses. A Zoom/World ID verification integration seeks to battle a supposed deepfake threat to business calls, and a Docusign partnership is designed to ensure signatures come from authentic users.
The company is also working on a number of features in anticipation of the Wild West of the agentic web, including one called “agent delegation,” in which a person can delegate their World ID to an agent to carry out online activities on their behalf. A partnership with authentication firm Okta has also created a system (currently in beta) that verifies that an agent is acting on behalf of a human. The system is set up so that a World ID can be tied to a specific agent and then, when the agent goes out into the web to operate on that person’s behalf, websites will know a verified person is behind the behavior, said Okta’s chief product officer, Gareth Davies, at the event.
So far, it’s been difficult for World to scale, due largely to the verification process itself. For much of the company’s history, to get its gold standard, you had to travel to one of its offices and have your eyeballs scanned by an Orb — a fairly inconvenient (not to mention weird) experience.
Image Credits:World
However, World has continually made moves to increase the ease and incentive structure for verification. In the past, it offered its crypto asset, Worldcoin, to some members who signed up and has distributed its Orbs into big retail chains so that users can verify themselves while they’re out shopping or getting a coffee. Now the company is announcing that it is significantly expanding its Orb saturation in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. The company also promoted a service where interested users could have World bring an Orb to their location for remote verification.
In a conversation with TechCrunch, Sada also shared that World has attempted to solve the scaling problem by creating different tiers of verification. The highest tier is Orb verification, but below that, World has previously offered a mid-level tier, which uses an anonymized scan of an official government ID via the card’s NFC chip.
The company also introduced a low-level tier, or what Sada called “low friction”— meaning low effort, I guess, but also “low security” — which involves merely taking a selfie.
Selfie Check, which Sada’s team presented during the event, is designed to maintain user privacy.
“Selfie is private by design,” said Daniel Shorr, one of TFH’s executives, during the presentation. “That means that we maximize the local processing that’s happening on your device, on your phone, which means that your images are yours.”
Selfie verification obviously isn’t new, and fraudsters have long managed to spoof it. “Obviously, we do our best, and it’s like one of the best systems that you’ll see for this. But it has limits,” Sada told TechCrunch. Developers looking to integrate World’s services can choose from the three different verification tiers depending on the level of security that’s important to them, he noted.
#Sam #Altmans #project #World #scale #human #verification #empire #stop #Tinder #TechCrunchDocuSign,sam altman,Tinder,World,Worldcoin,zoom](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Screenshot-2026-04-17-at-1.55.00-PM.png?w=680)


