Ethereum treasury FG Nexus, once eager to raise up to $5 billion, sells over 10,000 ETH to fund share buybacks

After saying in August it might want to raise up to $5 billion to buy Ethereum to become the "world's largest corporate holder" of ETH, Nasdaq-listed FG Nexus said on Thursday it had sold millions of dollars worth of the cryptocurrency in order to fuel share buybacks.

FX Nexus, which was previously known as Fundamental Global Inc., said in a third-quarter shareholders update that it had sold 10,922 ETH (worth over $32 million currently) to accelerate its plan to repurchase its own common shares.

That follows the company's August filing of a $5 billion shelf registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission. FX Nexus planned to raise as much as $5 billion to buy Ethereum.

Last month, Ethereum DAT ETHZilla also sold off approximately $40 million worth of its ether holdings to repurchase shares. That sale raised questions of whether DATs would start offloading the very assets they were created to hold, and yet most venture capital firms told The Block at the time that the potential trend was unlikely.

"Since commencing the buyback, we have repurchased 8% of our shares outstanding at a substantial discount to our net asset value while maintaining a strong ETH and cash balance," FG Nexus Chairman and CEO Kyle Cerminara said Thursday. "We plan to continue buying back shares while our stock trades below NAV, which creates increasingly asymptotic effect on our per-share valuation metrics as the number of shares outstanding declines and net asset value per share increases."

In September, many investors said the wave of DAT funding rounds had peaked. Those comments came as many DATs had begun trading at or below net asset value, according to The Block's new DAT data dashboard. Many market watchers have suggested the DAT space will see a lot of consolidation.

FG Nexus said Thursday it now holds 40,005 ether, worth about $120 million. Bitmine Immersion Tech is the world's largest Ethereum DAT with over 3 million ETH.