Peter Thiel Doubles Down: Billionaire Backs Ethereum with 7.5% Stake in ETHZilla

Silicon Valley's contrarian king strikes again—Peter Thiel just grabbed a 7.5% slice of ETHZilla, signaling unshakable faith in Ethereum's dominance. Here's why the move rattled TradFi circles.

The Thiel Effect: When Billionaires Bet on Blockchain

No PowerPoints, no vague Web3 promises—just cold, hard capital. Thiel's play echoes his early PayPal mafia days, doubling down on disruptive tech while Wall Street still debates 'blockchain vs. real assets.' Spoiler: he’s winning.

ETHZilla’s Ascent: More Than Just Whale Watching

With Thiel’s stake, the institutional floodgates creak open wider. ETHZilla’s structure—part ETF, part crypto hedge—lets old-money players dip toes without admitting they’ve joined the revolution. Cue eye-rolling from Bitcoin maxis.

The Cynic’s Take:

Another 'smart money' narrative? Maybe. But when a guy who called crypto 'the last honest market' backs Ethereum like it’s 1999, even skeptics check their wallets. Just don’t expect hedge funds to admit FOMO over martinis.

Peter Thiel Doubles Down On Ethereum

The disclosure, signed “/s/ Peter Thiel” on August 11, confirms beneficial ownership across multiple Founders Fund vehicles totaling roughly 11.6 million ATNF shares—7.5% of the float. The market reaction was immediate. ATNF shares more than tripled on Tuesday, closing NEAR $10.24—about 207% above Monday’s close—before cooling in after-hours trading.

ETHZilla’s pivot is not theoretical. In a press release furnished to the SEC on August 12, the company disclosed “total holdings of 82,186 Ether (‘ETH’) at an average acquisition price of $3,806.71,” valuing the position at approximately $349 million as of August 11. It also reported about $238 million in US dollar cash equivalents on the balance sheet.

Executive chairman McAndrew Rudisill framed the strategy as a purpose-built, institutional ETH reserve that will be actively deployed into staking and on-chain yield strategies run by an external manager: “At ETHZilla we have put over $350 million in capital to work since the PIPE transaction we completed last week… as we seek to deliver on our on-chain yield generation program through our external asset manager Electric Capital.”

Those disclosures cap a rapid financing sequence backing the accumulation plan. On August 4, ETHZilla closed a $425 million private placement, followed one week later by approximately $156 million of senior secured convertible notes due 2028. Each financing explicitly cited the goal of “rapidly” increasing the company’s ETH holdings.

Thiel’s MOVE into ETHZilla arrives less than a month after his group revealed a 9.1% passive stake in BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE American: BMNR), the most aggressive of the public “ETH treasury” cohort. That earlier 13G similarly listed Thiel as signatory and helped ignite a rally in BMNR.

Notably, The BitMine drumbeat grew louder again this week. On Tuesday, the company filed to enlarge its at-the-market equity program by another $20 billion—lifting total capacity to $24.5 billion—to finance additional ETH accumulation. The expansion was memorialized in a same-day FORM 8-K and prospectus supplement.

Tom Lee, co-founder of Fundstrat and Chairman of the Board of Directors at BitMine, is pursuing one of the largest Ethereum accumulation strategies in history through his company. BitMine has already amassed about 1.2 million ETH—roughly $5 billion worth—putting it 20% of the way toward its target of controlling 5% of Ethereum’s total supply.

Taken together, the signal from Thiel is unambiguous. After the 9.1% BitMine disclosure in mid-July, the 7.5% ETHZilla stake marks his second material bet on an Ethereum-first corporate treasury in less than a month, displaying the kind of high-conviction wager that ETH’s appreciation will outpace dilution, financing costs, and mark-to-market volatility—justifying aggressive balance-sheet accumulation now for outsized upside later.

At press time, ETH traded at $4,655.