Interfold Community Update: September 2026

Since our last community update, Interfold has moved from preparing for launch to operating on mainnet.

August marked the launch of FOLD and the start of Network Alpha. Since then, ciphernodes have begun joining and bonding FOLD, governance participation has started taking shape, and the team has continued hardening the protocol ahead of the first production E3s.

This is the beginning of a broader period of network formation: growing the operator set, activating governance, strengthening production infrastructure, and expanding the applications built on Interfold.

Here’s what has happened since our last update, what we’re working on now, and what comes next.

Network Alpha & Network Formation

Network Alpha went live in August, moving Interfold into its first coordinated mainnet phase.

Since launch:

512.1K+ FOLD has been bonded across ciphernodes
4.53M+ FOLD has been delegated for governance

This participation is beginning to form the operating network around Interfold. Community members can already bond FOLD, register ciphernodes, and begin running the infrastructure that will support future E3s.

Governance & Production Hardening

Governance is the next major step in Network Alpha.

The first governance proposals are being prepared, while FOLD holders can already lock and delegate FOLD to activate voting power. Because voting power is snapshotted when a proposal is created, holders who want to participate need to lock and delegate before a proposal goes live.

As part of production-readiness testing for private governance, the team identified two areas requiring additional work before deployment.

• The first involved the randomness source used for sortition. The issue, identified by community member SanLeo, could have allowed committee selection to be influenced. It has since been patched and audited by Zenith.
• The second surfaced while testing the larger parameter sets required for production FHE. The associated data requirements would make voting prohibitively expensive on Ethereum mainnet under the current design, so the team is implementing an updated data-availability approach to reduce costs while preserving strong availability guarantees.

This work is now being incorporated into the upcoming governance deployment and first production CRISP E3. In parallel, operator onboarding and governance preparation continue.

Technical Progress & R&D

Alongside Network Alpha and governance preparation, the cryptography team continued work across core circuits, L-BFV implementation, folding research, audit remediation, and development tooling.

Overcoming the C2 compilation roadblock

We successfully chunked C2 (share_computation), enabling the circuit to compile under the new TrLBFV Secure-16384 parameter set. We are now investigating whether this design can be reused across other circuits to reduce constraint costs.

Advancing L-BFV implementation

Most of the new L-BFV circuits are now in place, and we successfully completed the core L-BFV implementation in Rust within our fork of fhe.rs.

Exploring native folding schemes

We are evaluating several candidates as we explore the evolution of our ZK protocol through native folding schemes. Our decisions continue to be guided by measured performance and reliability while preserving the security assumptions of the current design.

Audit remediation and development tooling

We continued audit remediation work through fixes, refactoring, and optimizations. We also began experimenting with test-harness engineering for the cryptographic implementation, helping us catch invariant violations and prevent model drift during development.

FOLD Launch & Market Infrastructure

August also completed the FOLD launch sequence. Following two community auctions through Uniswap’s Continuous Clearing Auction, FOLD became generally transferable on August 19.

FOLD Auctions

The first FOLD auction settled 523.94 ETH, approximately 31% above its 400 ETH target, across 309 bids from 216 unique bidders. A total of 43,661,941.397 FOLD was distributed at a clearing price of 0.000012 ETH per FOLD.

Auction 2 sold its full 24 million FOLD allocation, settling 532,424.928851 USDC at a clearing price of 0.02241 USDC per FOLD, approximately 4% above the auction floor. Half of the proceeds were allocated toward long-term onchain liquidity support.

Liquidity & Market Infrastructure

We took a deliberate DEX-first approach to launch and have continued expanding the market infrastructure around FOLD.

Arrakis supports onchain liquidity across the FOLD/ETH and FOLD/USDC pairs, while Coinwatch provides additional oversight of market-maker performance through exchange sub-account integrations.

Expanding Access

FOLD has since expanded across venues including Upbit, Bithumb, BingX, KCEX, Kraken, and Bitvavo.

We continue to explore additional exchange access, DEX aggregators, additional pairs on additional DEXs, and support for bridged FOLD on alternative Layer 2 networks.

Transparency & Regulatory Infrastructure

Alongside distribution, we have continued building out the transparency and regulatory infrastructure around FOLD.

The Interfold Foundation notified its FOLD crypto-asset white paper under MiCA, with the filing now published in ESMA’s register.

We also completed a Token Transparency filing with Blockworks, covering FOLD’s supply, allocations, market structures, fundraising, and material risks, with the disclosure also available through Bloomberg Terminal.

Across these efforts, the priority remains expanding access while building sustainable market infrastructure around FOLD.

Community & Ecosystem

Since launch, community participation has expanded across content, tooling, operator activity, and network testing.

Into the Fold

We recently launched the Interfold Community Program, inviting creators, operators, and curious learners to contribute through original content, education, tooling, and technical participation.

A few recent creator highlights:

• @realchriswilder built an Interfold Community Board to help the ecosystem connect, learn, and participate.
• @yichuan_drive created a live Dune dashboard tracking the FOLD launch onchain.
• Tim Ho of 90 Seconds to Crypto published a long-form Interfold explainer alongside a YouTube Short, helping make the network more accessible to a broader audience.

We have also been running creator activations through Republic, Legion’s creator platform.

Community Participation

Community participation is extending into infrastructure as well.

Our recent ciphernode creator/operator campaign encouraged operators to document setup and share walkthroughs, helping make running a ciphernode more legible to others entering the network.

Community testing has also contributed directly to protocol hardening, with SanLeo’s sortition report providing one concrete example of community participation strengthening the network itself.

What’s Next

The immediate focus is bringing governance and the first production CRISP E3 online while continuing to grow the ciphernode operator set.

From there, the application surface broadens.

Work is progressing toward sealed-bid auctions, where private bids can produce verifiable outcomes without relying on a trusted auctioneer. We are exploring this design space with Railgun, including how shielded balances, confidential computation, and settlement can work together.

Beyond auctions, we are also exploring shared analytics, AI, and other data-coordination workflows where multiple parties need to produce a result without pooling or exposing their underlying inputs.

Upcoming

• September 15 — Interfold × Railgun livestream
• October 14 — Ethereum Foundation-hosted livestream demo
• TBD — dOrg Hot Seat