Billionaire investor Peter Thiel has quietly exited his stake in publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla, new SEC filings show — a sign of trouble for a company that once rode a wave of enthusiasm around ETH exposure. The filings show Thiel sold his roughly 7.5% holding in ETHZilla during Q4 2025. The timing comes as ETHZ shares have collapsed, falling about 98% from last year’s peak when adjusted for a 1-for-10 stock split the company executed in October, according to Yahoo Finance. ETHZilla stock briefly reached an effective high of $174.60 last August after news that Thiel had built a position across various Founders Fund entities; today the shares trade near $3.62 — a much steeper slide than Ethereum itself. Ethereum has also cooled sharply from its summer highs. The second-largest crypto by market cap has shed roughly 61% from an August all-time high of $4,946 and was trading around $1,944 recently. ETHZilla had been one of the most active publicly listed digital-asset treasuries since Thiel’s investment was disclosed. But the company’s attempts to shore up investor confidence — including a $250 million stock buyback announced in late August, a stock split, and further repurchases funded in part by selling about $40 million of ETH — weren’t enough to arrest the slide. The firm has also been pivoting toward tokenization and asset diversification: last week it announced plans to tokenize equity tied to leased jet engines it acquired for more than $12 million, and it says it intends to offer exposure to manufactured-home and auto loan portfolios in the future. ETHZilla declined to speculate on Thiel’s decision, telling Decrypt it could not “speculate about what drives their asset allocation decisions.” Thiel’s scaling back isn’t limited to ETHZilla. SEC records show Founders Fund entities also reduced stakes in BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm. Thiel reportedly held over 5 million BMNR shares in July; by September that had dropped to about 2.5 million. A related Founders Fund Growth II Management entity cut its BMNR holdings from 3.9 million to 1.9 million. BMNR’s shares have fallen nearly 64% over the past six months and were trading around $19.86. Taken together, the moves highlight a pullback by a high-profile investor from publicly listed ETH treasuries just as those businesses scramble to diversify and monetize new tokenization strategies amid a broader market rout. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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