「Vitalik's First Investment in Two Years」Narrative Supports a $100 Million Valuation—How Far Can This Privacy Protocol Go?

Amid a blazing market, Vitalik has finally made his move again after a two-year hiatus.

Last month, Vitalik投入 16 ETH (approximately $28,000) in the first round of CCA public auction for The Interfold on Uniswap. The last time Vitalik made a significant public investment in a new project's tokens or related assets was back in November 2024, when he spent 32 ETH (approximately $107,000) in the NFT public sale of the prediction market Truemarkets.

On August 19, $FOLD conducted its TGE, and subsequently surged as much as sevenfold. We need to look at these gains in two phases. On August 23, Upbit listed $FOLD, instantly doubling its price and pushing its market cap to around $230 million at one point. Before that, the rally was driven almost entirely by the "Vitalik bought it" narrative—a consensus organically formed among on-chain players around this story, which took the token from a market cap of roughly $28 million to a peak of around $140 million.

After the sudden positive catalyst of the Upbit listing, $FOLD failed to push higher alongside the broader market, instead retreating to levels seen before the news. So we can roughly say that the token has now returned to the value range justified by the "Vitalik bought it" narrative:

In fact, the "Vitalik bought it" narrative attached to $FOLD is bigger than one might think. This is a privacy-focused project—an open-source privacy protocol developed by Gnosis Guild that enables multiple mutually distrusting independent parties to jointly complete verifiable computations and produce shared results without exposing their private inputs, relying on a single operator, or using trusted hardware.

A concrete use case: for a DAO, anyone can vote privately—no one can see any individual voting record, yet everyone can verify the authenticity of the final voting result.

The encrypted data inputs are submitted to the protocol's encrypted execution environment (E3), and each computation involving encrypted data creates an independent E3. After the computation concludes, the E3 is shut down, leaving no trace of data.

Nodes performing encrypted computation and decryption must stake $FOLD to qualify.

Compared to ZEC—which is itself an asset primarily focused on privacy—The Interfold is a multi-party privacy computation protocol that allows all parties collaborating on a task to complete it without sharing their respective data. When thinking about practical use cases for something like this, it feels quite hardcore—hardcore in terms of the demand for privacy protection.

That is to say, when it comes to how easily a narrative can be accepted, something like ZEC is simple: "Privacy version of Bitcoin—no one can see where my money went." But The Interfold is harder to grasp. Vitalik had already directly promoted this project on X back in late May, and judging by his reasons for recommending it, it's clearly not easy to understand…

At this July's DappCon, Vitalik once again mentioned the project on stage:

Moreover, despite putting 16 ETH into the public auction, Vitalik has yet to claim the tokens from the sale, let alone sell them. Based on all of the above, it's fair to say that players don't really care what The Interfold can concretely be used for. All they need to know is that this is a project Vitalik believes in, repeatedly mentions, and has put his own money into.

As for where this token goes from here, my personal view is fairly optimistic. First, it's hard to draw a direct comparison with Truemarkets, the prediction market Vitalik last participated in, because the market environment during $TRUE's TGE last year is incomparable to now—and $TRUE was never listed on any exchange, whether major or minor.

$TRUE's peak fully diluted market cap never exceeded $20 million, whereas $FOLD currently has roughly 27% of its supply in circulation, with a circulating market cap of about $27 million and an FDV of around $100 million. As an asset that got listed on Upbit just days after its TGE, $FOLD seems to still have room from this perspective.

When Vitalik personally funds a project, for short-to-medium-term trading purposes, one can reasonably assume he won't sell. In the case of Truemarkets, whether at current price lows or last October's peak, he remained completely stationary. The "Vitalik bought it" narrative will continue to persist for $FOLD—especially given that he keeps mentioning it himself, the probability of waking up one day to a "Vitalik sold it" narrative seems genuinely low.

Second, although this project is a legitimate privacy protocol, there's nothing wrong with approaching it from a meme coin perspective when it comes to speculation. The positive catalysts we can list right now—ETH strength, a healthy overall on-chain market, the Upbit listing, and Vitalik's repeated mentions—are all attention-driven factors. The bet is that in an environment of overall strong liquidity, ETH will also see market participants chase a popular target of its own.

Its technology and use cases are inherently difficult to understand, which means that for most on-chain players, what captures attention won't be the tech or the use cases themselves, but rather the multiple attention-driven factors mentioned above.

However, given that Robinhood, BSC, Solana, and other chains are all showing solid profit opportunities, whether trading a token with a circulating market cap of nearly $30 million on the ETH mainnet—a chain that currently lacks much heat—is getting ahead of the curve or simply too niche remains unclear at this point. At the current level, while $FOLD has Vitalik's endorsement, the odds may not be all that attractive.