Vitalik Buterin has made a fresh public bet on a new crypto project for the first time in two years, and that move has become a major part of the market story around The Interfold.
Last month, Buterin put 16 ETH, or about $28,000 based on the source article, into The Interfold’s first CCA public auction on Uniswap. The article says his previous sizable public purchase of a new project token or related asset dates back to November 2024, when he spent 32 ETH, about $107,000, in the public NFT sale for prediction market Truemarkets.
$FOLD surged after TGE, then spiked again on Upbit
$FOLD held its token generation event on Aug. 19 and later rose more than sevenfold at the high. The move, however, unfolded in two distinct stages.
Before Upbit entered the picture, the rally was driven mostly by one simple idea: Vitalik bought it. According to the article, on-chain traders built their own consensus around that narrative, lifting the token from a market value of about $28 million to a peak of roughly $140 million.
Then came Aug. 23, when Upbit listed $FOLD. The listing briefly doubled the price again and pushed the token to about a $230 million market capitalization. After that catalyst hit, the token did not keep climbing with the broader market and instead fell back to the level seen before the Upbit listing. The source’s conclusion is straightforward: $FOLD has largely returned to the valuation range supported by the “Vitalik bought it” narrative alone.
What The Interfold is building
The Interfold is a privacy-focused project and an open-source privacy protocol developed by Gnosis Guild. Its aim is to let multiple independent parties that do not trust one another carry out verifiable computation together without exposing their private inputs, without relying on a single operator, and without using trusted hardware.
The article gives DAO voting as one example. Under that setup, anyone can vote privately, no one can see an individual voting record, and participants can still verify that the final result is correct.
Encrypted data inputs are submitted to the protocol’s encrypted execution environment, E3. Each computation involving encrypted data creates a separate E3, and once the computation ends, that E3 is shut down and leaves no data trace behind.
Nodes that perform encrypted computation and decryption must stake $FOLD to qualify.
A harder narrative than ZEC
The article compares The Interfold with ZEC. ZEC is itself a privacy-oriented asset, which makes the pitch relatively easy to understand. The Interfold, by contrast, is framed as a multi-party privacy computation protocol. The point is not simply private money transfers, but allowing several parties working on the same task to do so without sharing their own underlying data.
That makes it more technical and, in the article’s view, harder for the market to digest quickly. A line like “private Bitcoin” is simple. The Interfold takes more work to explain.
Buterin had already promoted the project directly on X in late May this year. He also mentioned it on stage at dappcon in July. The article uses those appearances to argue that his support has been repeated rather than incidental.
Buterin has not claimed the auction tokens
Beyond public mentions, Buterin also committed capital. The article says that, so far, he has not even claimed the tokens from the public sale, let alone sold them.
That detail matters for how traders are reading the situation. The source’s point is that many market participants may not care much about what The Interfold can specifically do today. What they see is a project Buterin has mentioned repeatedly and personally backed with money.
Current circulating metrics in the article
The source also compares The Interfold with Truemarkets, though it notes that the market backdrop was different. In the article’s telling, when $TRUE held its TGE last year, conditions were not comparable to those of today, and $TRUE was not listed on any exchange, large or small.
$TRUE’s fully diluted peak market value never broke above $20 million, the article says. $FOLD, by contrast, is currently about 27% in circulation, with a circulating market capitalization of roughly $27 million and a fully diluted valuation of about $100 million. For a token that completed TGE only a few days ago and has already landed on Upbit, the article says that may leave room from that angle.
Attention remains the main driver
The article ends by arguing that while The Interfold is a serious privacy protocol project, the market may still trade it with a meme-coin mindset. The tailwinds being cited now include ETH strength, a hot on-chain market, the Upbit listing, and Buterin’s repeated mentions. Those are all attention-driven factors.
Its technology and use cases are not easy for most on-chain traders to grasp at a glance. Because of that, the source argues, the real draw is less the underlying product than the collection of signals around it.
At the same time, the article notes that Robinhood, BSC, and Solana are all showing stronger money-making effects. Against that backdrop, it is still unclear whether trading a token with a circulating market value nearing $30 million on Ethereum mainnet, a chain the article describes as not especially hot right now, amounts to getting in early or backing something too niche. Its final view is that $FOLD still has Buterin’s public support, but the risk-reward at current levels may not be especially compelling.