Richard Heart’s newest project, ProveX, received a flood of ETH in early January 2026. On-chain analyst Specter says a large share of it appears to have come from Heart’s own side of the ledger.
Between January 5 and January 7, approximately 128,808 ETH, worth around $413 million, landed in a wallet linked to ProveX’s public sacrifice address. Specter (@SpecterAnalyst) traced those funds back through Tornado Cash to deposits made by wallets associated with Heart. If the trail holds, a fundraiser that looked like strong outside demand may have been at least partly a closed loop.
Following the money through the mixer
According to Specter’s analysis, the January flows began with withdrawals in 100 ETH increments. Those funds then moved through more than 800 intermediary wallets before reaching the ProveX-linked address.
The key to the trace sits upstream. Heart-associated wallets reportedly sent 112,987 ETH into Tornado Cash in November 2025. In October 2025, the same cluster pushed over $600 million into the mixer.
Specter connected those earlier deposits to the later withdrawals that ended up in ProveX’s sacrifice wallet.
The timing is also notable. ProveX’s sacrifice phase was approaching its end in early January, with a scheduled 6.25% rate increase set for January 8. The bulk of the traced inflows arrived in the three days immediately before it.
What a sacrifice actually means
ProveX uses what Heart calls a public sacrifice. Participants send ETH and other assets to designated addresses. In return, they may receive future token allocations, though nothing is promised.
Heart was explicit about that last part. The receiving address was published alongside a campaign that warned participants their coins could be sold and that they would receive no benefit.
On the product side, ProveX pitches itself as infrastructure for trustless, non-custodial peer-to-peer payment settlement and cross-chain transactions. It relies on zero-knowledge proofs, a cryptographic method that lets one party prove something is true without revealing the underlying data.
A familiar playbook
ProveX follows HEX and PulseChain as Heart’s latest venture. The January pattern has drawn comparisons to PulseX in 2022, where a similar funding approach was used.
The use of a mixer adds a new wrinkle. Recycling funds through Tornado Cash before sending them into a public sacrifice address is not the behavior of someone trying to make provenance easy to verify.
What this means
For anyone weighing a ProveX allocation, the core issue is price discovery. By February 2026, analysts estimated that approximately $400 million of the funds raised during the ProveX sacrifice could be traced back to recycled funds linked to Heart, funneled through Tornado Cash. If roughly $413 million of inflows came from a single related source, the apparent level of outside demand may be overstated.
There is also a fairness question. Contributors who sent real outside capital before the January 8 rate increase were competing for allocations alongside funds that may have originated with the organizer. Depending on how ProveX distributes tokens, Heart-linked wallets could end up with a substantial share of supply, acquired with money that arguably never left the family.
Zero-knowledge technology is built to let users prove things without revealing them. ProveX’s fundraising may now need to do the opposite: reveal enough to prove the raise was what it appeared to be.
Disclosure: This article was edited by John Chen. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.