Amid a fiercely hot market, Vitalik has finally made a move again after 2 years.
Last month, Vitalik invested 16 ETH (approximately $28,000) in the first round of the public CCA auction for The Interfold on Uniswap. Vitalik's last publicly disclosed, substantial investment into a new project's tokens or related assets dates back to November 2024, when he invested 32 ETH (about $107,000 at the time) in the public NFT sale of the prediction market Truemarkets.
On August 19th, $FOLD conducted its TGE and subsequently surged over 7x at its peak. We need to look at this price action in two phases. On August 23rd, Upbit listed $FOLD, instantly doubling the price and pushing its market cap to around $230 million at one point. Prior to that, the rise was almost entirely fueled by the "Vitalik bought it" narrative. The consensus organically formed among on-chain players around this narrative drove the coin's market cap from around $28 million to a peak of about $140 million.
After the unexpected positive catalyst of the Upbit listing, $FOLD did not continue to rise further with the overall market trend but instead retraced back to levels seen before the listing news. Therefore, we can roughly say that the coin has now returned to the value range defined by the "Vitalik bought it" narrative:
In reality, the "Vitalik bought it" narrative surrounding the $FOLD token is more significant than it might seem. This is a privacy project, an open-source privacy protocol developed by Gnosis Guild. It enables multiple mutually distrusting parties to jointly perform verifiable computations, producing a shared result, without exposing their private inputs, relying on a single operator, or using trusted hardware.
For concrete use cases, consider a DAO: anyone can vote privately, with no one able to see any individual voting record, yet everyone can verify the authenticity of the final voting outcome.
Encrypted data inputs are submitted to the protocol's encrypted execution environment, E3. Each computation involving encrypted data creates an independent E3 instance. Once the computation is complete, the E3 instance is shut down, leaving no data traces behind.
Nodes performing the ciphertext computation and decryption must stake $FOLD tokens to gain eligibility.
Compared to ZEC: ZEC is itself an asset focused on privacy, whereas The Interfold is a multi-party privacy computation protocol that allows each participant in a joint task to complete the work without sharing their respective data. This type of protocol feels quite esoteric when imagining practical applications, particularly regarding the necessity of privacy protection.
In terms of how easily a narrative is accepted, something like ZEC is simple: "privacy version of Bitcoin, no one sees where my money goes." However, something like The Interfold has a higher barrier to understanding. As early as late May this year, Vitalik directly promoted this project on X. Just looking at his reasoning shows it's not easy to grasp...
At dappcon in July, Vitalik mentioned the project again on stage:
Furthermore, Vitalik invested 16 ETH in the public auction, but he has not yet claimed the tokens from the sale, let alone sold them. Given all the above, it's fair to say that what The Interfold can actually be used for is of little concern to most traders. It's enough to know it's a project that Vitalik is bullish on, repeatedly mentions, and has personally invested in.
As for where the token goes from here, my personal view is relatively optimistic. First, it's difficult to compare it to Vitalik's last major involvement with the prediction market Truemarkets. When $TRUE had its TGE last year, the market environment was incomparable to now. Moreover, $TRUE wasn't listed on any exchange, neither major nor minor.
$TRUE's peak fully diluted valuation (FDV) didn't break $20 million. $FOLD currently has about 27% circulating supply, a circulating market cap of around $27 million, and an FDV of approximately $100 million. Considering it got listed on Upbit just days after its TGE, $FOLD seems to have room from this perspective.
For projects Vitalik personally puts money into, for short-to-medium term speculation, one can assume he won't sell. At least with Truemarkets, whether at current lows or last October's peak, he has remained inactive. The "Vitalik bought it" narrative will likely persist for $FOLD, especially as he himself keeps mentioning it. The probability of waking up one day to find the narrative changed to "Vitalik sold" is indeed low.
Secondly, although this is a genuine privacy protocol project, from a speculative standpoint, approaching it with a meme coin mindset isn't entirely wrong. The bullish points we can list now—ETH strength, a strong overall on-chain market, the Upbit listing, Vitalik's repeated mentions—are all essentially attention-driven logic. The bet is that in an environment of good overall liquidity, ETH will also see its own popular, chased-after token emerge.
Its technology and use cases themselves are inherently difficult to understand. This also means that for most on-chain players, the points of attraction won't be the technology or use cases per se, but the multiple attention-driven factors mentioned above.
However, with solid profit-making effects on Robinhood, BSC, Solana, and other chains, speculating on a token with a circulating market cap already nearing $30 million, and on the Ethereum mainnet—which currently lacks much heat—is a gamble. Is it getting ahead of the curve, or is it too niche? It's hard to judge at this moment. At its current level, while $FOLD has Vitalik's endorsement, the potential risk/reward ratio might not be that enticing either.
