Peter Thiel Dumps Ethereum Treasury Play ETHZilla, Exits Entire Stake

Peter Thiel and entities tied to Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla, the publicly traded Ethereum treasury play that once marketed itself as a proxy bet on corporate ETH accumulation. A Schedule 13G/A filed Tuesday shows the reporting group finished 2025 with no remaining common shares, wiping out a position that had been closely watched across both crypto and small-cap equity circles.

Thiel Exists Ethereum Treasury Play

The amended filing, dated Feb. 17, 2026, is unusually blunt on the current footprint: “Aggregate amount… 0.00. Percent of class… 0.0%. Ownership of 5 percent or less of a class.” The positions are reported as of Dec. 31, 2025, meaning the exit was completed by year-end.

That zeroed-out line item is a sharp contrast to what Thiel-related vehicles disclosed just a quarter earlier. In a prior Schedule 13G/A reporting holdings as of Sept. 30, 2025, Thiel was listed with 928,389 shares beneficially owned, representing 5.6% of the class at that time, with additional blocks attributed to Founders Fund entities. The same filing noted the company’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split effective Oct. 20, 2025, with reported share counts adjusted accordingly.

ETHZilla’s story arc matters because it tried to translate the Bitcoin treasury template into an ETH-native wrapper at a moment when public-market vehicles were being pitched as liquid, leverable on-ramps to digital asset exposure. Thiel’s initial involvement, widely reported as a 7.5% stake disclosed in August 2025, helped legitimize that pitch, at least briefly.

More recently, ETHZilla has been signaling a pivot away from a pure ETH-treasury identity and toward tokenized real-world assets, including aviation. In an 8-K tied to a Feb. 12 press release, the company said its subsidiary launched “Eurus Aero Token I,” describing it as “a tokenized real-world asset instrument” that gives exposure to aircraft engines on lease “through tradable digital tokens representing contractual revenue rights.”

The sequencing leaves traders with an uncomfortable, unresolved question: did Founders Fund’s exit precede (and implicitly front-run) the strategy shift, or was it simply a portfolio cleanup after the initial “ETH treasury” narrative cooled?

On X, one commentator framed Thiel’s timing as part of a broader pattern, though several of the post’s claims go beyond what’s in the SEC filing. The account @treebook78 called Thiel a “master at sensing crises,” writing that he “dodged this current dip too,” and arguing he’s an “exit master” who gets out early when bubbles or stress build.

“Back in 2022, he posted diamond hands on SNS telling people to hold Bitcoin forever, but then he quietly sold everything and avoided the Luna crash and FTX collapse (as I recall),” @treebook78 wrote.

At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,984.