In brief
- Billionaire investor Peter Thiel and Founders Fund dumped all their shares in Ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla.
- Thiel and Founders Fund had purchased a 7.5% stake in the firm in July, sending shares upward amid the news.
- Shares of ETHZ have tumbled around 98% from their August high, factoring in October’s 1-for-10 stock split.
Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel exited his 7.5% stake in Ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla during Q4 2025, according to new filings with the SEC.
Thiel’s exit comes amid plunging prices for shares of ETHZ, now down about 98% since last year’s peak, per data from Yahoo Finance that factors in a 1-for-10 stock split executed in October.
ETHZilla shares peaked at an effective price of $174.60 last August following news that Thiel had created a position in ETHZilla across his various Founders Fund entities. Now they’re trading at just $3.62 per share, showing a much more sizable drop than that of Ethereum itself during the same timeframe.
Ethereum, the second-largest crypto asset by market cap, has now fallen nearly 61% from its August all-time high of $4,946, and was recently changing hands around $1,944.
ETHZilla has been one of the most active publicly traded digital asset treasuries since Thiel’s purchase was disclosed last August—but not only via Ethereum acquisitions, as ETHZilla has made a number of moves to boost its stock price and diversify itself within the ETH ecosystem.
As shares fell in late August, ETHZilla announced a $250 million stock buyback program in the hopes of rewarding investors. A few months later, it conducted a stock split and once more leaned into share repurchases, this time fueled by the sale of $40 million worth of Ethereum it had previously acquired.
Now the company is attempting to take advantage of additional opportunities given its proximity to Ethereum and the tokenization trend on the network.
Last week the firm announced it was tokenizing equity to leased jet engines that it had acquired for more than $12 million. In the future, it aims to provide exposure to manufactured home loans and car loans, as well.
ETHZilla declined to comment on the moves from Thiel and Founders Fund, telling Decrypt that it could not “speculate about what drives their asset allocation decisions.”
It’s not just the ETHZilla investment that Thiel and his Founders Fund lowered their overall exposure to, either. The parties significantly decreased their holdings in BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR)—the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm—as well.
In July, Thiel reportedly owned more than 5 million shares of BMNR, according to an SEC filing. By September, that number had dipped to just 2.5 million, with the Founders Fund Growth II Management entity also cutting its holdings from 3.9 million shares to just 1.9 million.
Shares of BMNR have fallen hard in the last six months as well, dropping by almost 64% to recently trade at $19.86.
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