Peter Thiel Walks Out of ETHZilla: The Crypto Drama You Never Knew

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So, the big brains at Founders Fund have rolled up their sleeves and dumped every last ETHZilla share. The beta‑broke, public‑market crypto treasury play that pretended to be the go‑to for corporate Ethereum hoarding is now a relic of a very, very bad idea. A Schedule 13G/A filed on Tuesday nicely tells the world that the holdings count has zeroed out, leaving holders to wonder if they’d been on a bad reality show all along.

Thiel’s Exit – Because Who Needs a Crypto Billionaire on the Books?

The revised filing, dated 17 Feb 2026, reads like a polite accounting joke: “Aggregate amount… 0.00. Percent of class… 0.0%. Ownership of 5 per cent or less of a class.” By 31 Dec 2025, the Ether‑nest eggs were all gone, so the return on that particular bet is a dramatic number: zero.

PETER THIEL EXITS ETHEREUM DAT “ETHZILLA” AMID $ETHZ TOKENIZED JET ENGINE FOCUS: FILING

– Aggr News (@AggrNews) 18 Feb 2026

That stark, razor‑sharp line is a far cry from the short‑term brag of a throwaway March 2025 filing, when Thiel was listed as owning 928,389 shares – a tidy 5.6 % – along with a string of Founders Fund entities. That other doc also had the company go 1‑for‑10 on Oct 20, 2025, a neatly executed reverse split that only muddied the figures a touch.

After all, ETHZilla tried to copy the Bitcoin treasury bandolier and slap on an ETH coat‑of‑paint. The idea popped up at a time when market‑listed vehicles were jiggling through the “liquid, leveraged, on‑ramps to digital assets” mould. Thiel’s early 7.5 % stake (8 Aug 2025) lent a little credence – though nothing the way “buy ETH, hold ETH, and sprinkle a bit of paper on a company name” would have done for Fear‑The‑M – and maybe gave people a decent story for the weekend.

Fast‑forward a bit: ETHZilla’s pivot from pure ETH to tokenised real‑world assets, including aircraft engines, landed them a press release on 12 Feb. The new token, “Eurus Aero Token I,” sounds like a flight‑powered hedge fund but is really a shiny way of saying the company wants to rumble the last bit of traditional asset makin’ a good show out of the crypto market’s sorcery.

So, who did the math mistake first? Did the Founders Fund exit pre‑emptively tokenise everything after the “ETH‑treasury” hype fizzled? Or just tidy a portfolio after a financial drama that turned into a no‑candy‑crowd? The filing leaves us all wading between grandiose intent and last‑minute clean‑ups.

On X, @treebook78 rolled out a tiny thesis about Thiel being the “master at sensing crises.” Profile notes Thiel’s diamond‑hands hype in 2022, only to quietly pull everyone out of the way when Luna and FTX hit the desert of disappointment. According to the rooter, Thiel’s a keen strategist – getting out early when bubbles grow too thick (or too sweet).

And for the record, Ethereum was probably trading at roughly $1,984 when the ink dried on all of this.

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2026-02-19 05:41