Cathie Wood backs Ethereum’s ZK push, says ‘the math is mathin’

ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, long known for her Bitcoin maximalist leanings, gave Ethereum some unexpected support this week. On X, she admitted that she doesn’t grasp all the tech details but believes the Ethereum Foundation is making the right moves on scalability and privacy.

Her comments come right after the Ethereum Foundation unveiled plans to integrate zero-knowledge  (ZK) proofs directly into the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM). This suggests that zkEVMs are going native.

Amid these comments, ETH price reclaimed the much anticipated $3,000 mark with a surge of 20% over the last seven days.

Ethereum’s ZK vision gets Ark’s nod

Cathie Wood appears to be taking a greater interest in Ethereum. Lorenzo Valiente, Director of Research at Ark, highlighted in a post that since the Merger happened (1,031 days ago), only 373K ETH net has been issued. However, over the last nine days, Ethereum-linked ETFs have pulled in over 380K ETH.

Valiente stated that it is 3 years of new supply eaten up in less than two weeks, and added that supply shock is coming for Bitcoin and Ethereum. To this, Wood commented that, “the price of any good is determined at the margin, demand relative to supply. The math is mathin”

Ethereum’s ZK bet is coming to life. This will allow one party to prove possession of certain information without revealing the information itself. This move reduces computational load and enables greater throughput. This all will happen without sacrificing decentralization or composability.

Raye Hadi, Research Associate at ARK, mentioned that the Ethereum Foundation targets real-time L1 proving, where 99% of block proofs are generated within less than 10 seconds. He added that Hardware costs for provers might be less than $100k, and less than 10kW power would be used.

He added that this upgrade represents the cultural shift that Ethereum has been promising. Meanwhile, the execution still remains a challenge for them, but the vision is becoming clearer.

Ethereum Foundation offloads ETH

Amidst all of these advocacies, the Ethereum Foundation (EF) sold 10,000 ETH (worth $25.7 million) in an OTC deal to Nasdaq-listed gaming company SharpLink. The transaction was conducted on July 10. This also marks the first direct purchase of ETH from the Foundation by a publicly traded company.

It sold the ETH at an average price of $2,572.37, and all the proceeds reportedly will be used to support the Foundation’s core operations.

As per the data provided by Lookonchain, SharpLink bought another 16,374 ETH (worth $49 million). The gaming firm has bought 60,582 Ethereum (worth $180 million) in the past 5 days.

Ethereum price is up by 85% in the past 90 days, showing a massive comeback. Meanwhile, it is still down by 8% on YTD basis. ETH is trading at an average price of $3,044 at press time. Its 24-hour trading volume spiked by 120% to stand at $32.2 billion.

Spot Ethereum ETFs in the US saw over $204 million in net inflows on July 11. The rally was led by BlackRock’s ETHA product, with a record $137 million daily intake. Grayscale’s ETH remained second with a $25.5 million inflow.

Corporate treasuries are increasingly exploring ETH as a treasury reserve asset, mirroring the BTC play adopted by Strategy and others.

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