Transform "trusting a person" into "trusting cryptography"; The Interfold is not overly ambitious but hits the target precisely.

Written by: angelilu, Foresight News

Original published on June 2

Vitalik expressed support for the confidential coordination infrastructure The Interfold in a post this May, and its token FOLD will officially commence through the Uniswap CCA (Continuous Clearing Auction) mechanism today (July 8) at 22:00, lasting for 48 hours until July 10.

FOLD is the functional token of The Interfold: Ciphernodes can use it to stake for network access and earn rewards; applications can use it to pay for cryptographic computation requests, and holders can participate in protocol governance.

This auction adopts a uniform clearing price mechanism, where all successful bidders transact at the same price, and portions of bids exceeding the clearing price can be withdrawn for rebidding. Participation in the auction requires completing KYC verification through Predicate, and the pre-registration window closed yesterday. After the auction concludes, there will be a 40-day cooling period, during which FOLD can only be used for Ciphernode staking and cannot be freely transferred; the official TGE is expected on August 19.

Below is the original text:

On-chain voting is the most appealing aspect of decentralized protocols—transparent, public, and open to anyone for participation. However, public does not mean it can fully represent the consensus of the community. The existence of "governance bribery markets" like Votium allows anyone with sufficient funds to directly bid to voters before the voting deadline. The result is that the direction of the protocol is often determined not by community consensus but by the highest bidder.

A protocol called The Interfold chooses to tackle this issue at its root.

Confidential Coordination Infrastructure

The Interfold (formerly known as Enclave) positions itself as a "confidential coordination infrastructure," aiming to enable multiple independent participants to collaboratively produce a verifiable result without exposing their respective input data.

The core concept of The Interfold is E3 (Encrypted Execution Environment). Its principle is that computational tasks are assigned to a distributed network consisting of "Ciphernodes": user inputs always exist in encrypted form, and computations are performed directly on the ciphertext, with only the aggregated results decrypted and disclosed at the end. Throughout the process, no party can see the original data of others.

The technology stack supporting this mechanism consists of three layers: FHE (Fully Homomorphic Encryption) allows computations to be conducted directly on encrypted data; ZK proofs (Zero-Knowledge Proofs) verify whether the computation process is executed honestly; DTC (Decentralized Threshold Cryptography) distributes the decryption rights across multiple nodes, eliminating single-point trust risks.

The Interfold's currently promoted application scenario is CRISP (Coercion-Resistant Impartial Selection Protocol), designed specifically for voting scenarios in DAO governance. CRISP achieves three things: all votes are encrypted throughout the process, making it impossible for anyone to view individual tickets before counting; "no-receipt voting," where users cannot prove to third parties what they voted for, fundamentally cutting off bribery paths; and ZK proofs ensure the verifiability of counting results.

Currently, two demo versions of CRISP have gone live, and the team is in the system integration and internal test network verification phase. Confirmed ecological collaborations include: Zcash community's private governance tool Zecret Ballots, mobile DAO governance application Goverland, as well as joint integration with Aragon and Status App.

Vitalik's Public Endorsement

On-chain governance bribery is not a new issue, but its measurable scale has been rapidly expanding since 2024. Just within the Curve ecosystem, the total bribery amount circulating through platforms like Votium exceeded $120 million throughout 2024; meanwhile, the median voting rate for various DAO proposals still hovers in single digits.

This issue is not one that the Ethereum community is unaware of. In 2019, Vitalik published a research post on ethresear.ch proposing the conceptual framework of MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure), envisioning the use of cryptographic means to eliminate voting bribery. This post has been frequently cited since but has seen limited progress in practical implementation—the MACI scheme relies on a trusted "coordinator" role that can see all votes, and if this data is leaked, privacy protections immediately become ineffective.

On May 28, 2026, Vitalik publicly endorsed The Interfold on platform X stating, "It’s basically what I’ve been shouting for nearly a decade for someone to do, and now it’s being realized in a general form."

The core bet of The Interfold is: having a single trusted coordinator is the fundamental bottleneck of MACI, and decentralized threshold decryption is the correct path.

Team Background

The Interfold is developed by Gnosis Guild, a team long focused on Ethereum DAO infrastructure, previously known in the industry for its modular DAO toolkit Zodiac. Zodiac is one of the most widely used permission and execution frameworks in the Ethereum DAO ecosystem, with partners covering multiple leading protocols. The specific names of core team members have not yet been disclosed through official channels. The project also has no publicly disclosed institutional financing records.

Compared to larger general privacy protocols like Aztec and Zama, The Interfold is a "small but beautiful" project; it does not attempt to become a general privacy infrastructure but focuses on a specific, long-unresolved clean issue—making on-chain voting truly unpurchaseable. Not overly ambitious, yet precisely targeted.

From MACI to The Interfold

Vitalik introduced the concept framework of MACI (Minimal Anti-Collusion Infrastructure) in 2019, which has been deployed in scenarios such as Gitcoin, but it has always had a structural flaw: it requires a trusted coordinator, and if that coordinator's private key is leaked, the entire privacy protection becomes ineffective. The Interfold is the generalization and practical implementation of this framework—replacing a single coordinator with a distributed network of cipher nodes, transforming "trusting a person" into "trusting cryptography."