In the midst of a hot market, Vitalik has finally made a move again after two years.
Last month, Vitalik invested 16 ETH (approximately $28,000) in the first round of public CCA auctions on Uniswap through The Interfold. Vitalik’s previous significant public investment in a new project’s token or related asset dates back to November 2024, when he invested 32 ETH (approximately $107,000) in the NFT public sale of the prediction market Truemarkets.
On August 19, $FOLD underwent its TGE, subsequently rising more than sevenfold. This increase should be viewed in two phases. On August 23, Upbit listed $FOLD, instantly doubling its price and pushing its market cap to approximately $230 million. Prior to this, the price surge was driven almost entirely by the narrative that "Vitalik bought it"—a consensus spontaneously formed by on-chain participants, which propelled the token’s market cap from around $28 million to a peak of approximately $140 million.
After the sudden good news of its listing on Upbit, $FOLD did not continue to rise with the market but instead retreated back to its pre-news level. Therefore, we can roughly say that the coin has now returned to its value range defined by the narrative of "Vitalik bought":
In fact, the narrative that “Vitalik bought it” surrounding the $FOLD token is larger than expected. This is a privacy-focused project developed by Gnosis Guild—an open-source privacy protocol that enables multiple mutually distrustful independent parties to jointly perform verifiable computations without exposing their private inputs, relying on a single operator, or using trusted hardware, while producing a shared result.
A specific use case: for a DAO, anyone can vote privately, with no one able to see any individual vote record, yet everyone can verify the authenticity of the final voting result.
Encrypted data inputs are submitted to the protocol's encrypted execution environment (E3). Each computation involving encrypted data creates a separate E3, which is shut down after the calculation is complete, leaving no data traces.
Nodes that perform ciphertext computations and decryption must qualify by staking $FOLD.
Compared to ZEC, ZEC itself is an asset designed primarily for privacy, while The Interfold is a multi-party privacy-preserving computation protocol that enables all parties involved in a task to collaborate without sharing their individual data. When imagining real-world use cases, this technology feels more technically demanding, precisely due to its strong emphasis on privacy protection.
In terms of how easily a narrative is accepted, ZEC is very straightforward: “privacy-focused Bitcoin, no one can see where my money goes.” But something like The Interfold has a higher barrier to understanding. Vitalik directly promoted this project on X at the end of May this year—just look at his reasons for recommending it, and you’ll see how complex it is…
At DappCon this past July, Vitalik mentioned this project live on stage:
In addition, Vitalik bid 16 ETH in the public auction, but he has not yet claimed the tokens from the sale, let alone sold them. Given all these actions, players don’t care what exactly The Interfold is used for—they simply know that Vitalik supports it, has mentioned it repeatedly, and has invested his own money into it.
As for how this coin will perform going forward, I’m personally optimistic. First, it’s difficult to compare it with Vitalik’s previous involvement in the prediction market Truemarkets, because the market environment at the time of $TRUE’s TGE last year was vastly different from today, and $TRUE was not listed on any exchange—big or small.
The fully diluted market cap of $TRUE never exceeded $20 million, while $FOLD is currently around 27% circulated, with a circulating market cap of approximately $27 million and an FDV of about $100 million. As a project that listed on Upbit just days after its TGE, $FOLD appears to have potential from this perspective.
The projects Vitalik has personally funded can be seen as ones he won’t sell, at least on Truemarkets—whether at today’s price low or last October’s peak, he has consistently held. The narrative that “Vitalik bought” will continue to support $FOLD, especially since he himself keeps bringing it up; the likelihood of waking up one day to find the narrative has shifted to “Vitalik sold” is very low.
Second, although this project is a legitimate privacy protocol, it’s not unreasonable to approach it from a meme coin perspective in terms of hype. Currently, the bullish factors we can cite—such as Ethereum’s strength, positive overall on-chain market conditions, listing on Upbit, and repeated mentions by Vitalik—are all attention-driven logic, betting that in an environment with strong liquidity, Ethereum will also attract attention as a popular asset of its own.
Its technology and use cases are inherently difficult to understand, which means that for most on-chain users, the points that attract attention will not be the technology or use cases themselves, but rather the multiple attention-driving factors mentioned above.
Given the strong profit potential on chains like Robinhood, BSC, and Solana, it’s unclear whether investing in an asset on Ethereum mainnet—currently lacking significant traction—with a circulating market cap nearing $30 million is a timely move or too niche. At this stage, despite Vitalik’s endorsement, $FOLD’s risk-reward profile may not be particularly compelling.