The deal grants ETHZilla access to Karus’s AI underwriting engine and loan origination network, positioning the crypto treasury company to offer auto credit onchain in 2026.
Crypto treasury company ETHZilla (ETHZ) has taken a strategic step into onchain credit with the acquisition of a 20% fully diluted stake in automotive-finance AI startup Karus.
The $10 million deal includes $3 million in cash and $7 million in ETHZilla stock, and will allow the company to integrate Karus’s underwriting AI models into its blockchain stack to issue tokenized auto-loan portfolios.
According to Wednesday’s announcement, Karus’s decisioning engine is trained on more than 20 million historical auto-loan outcomes and has evaluated over $5 billion in loans at origination, giving ETHZilla a pre-modeled data set to structure AI-segmented pools with onchain settlement. The first tokenized portfolios are slated for early 2026.
