ETHZilla made a recent move—spending $10 million to acquire a 20% stake in Karus.

This deal is quite interesting: a combination of $3 million in cash and $7 million in stock, amounting to a 20% share based on the fully diluted valuation. But the focus isn’t on the numbers—it’s on what they plan to do.

Karus has an AI risk pricing system specifically designed for credit assessment and underwriting modeling of auto loans. ETHZilla’s plan is to integrate this model into their own blockchain infrastructure—in short, allowing AI-screened auto loan assets to go directly on-chain, creating a risk-adjusted on-chain loan portfolio.

Tokenization of traditional financial assets has been talked about for years, but there are still very few cases that can truly run the full process of “risk control model → asset screening → on-chain issuance.” According to their timeline, we should see some initial results by 2026.

Whether the tech integration will actually work, and whether the market will accept on-chain auto loan products, are still two big questions that will need to be addressed as things progress.