Peter Thiel went to zero in ETHZilla, and the ETH treasury company trade just got a lot more real
On Feb. 17, an amended 13G/A posted to ETHZilla’s investor site listed Peter Thiel and Founders Fund-related vehicles at zero shares and 0.0% beneficial ownership.
The filing also stamped a “date of event” of Dec. 31, 2025, which sets the timing frame for what the document captures, a beneficial ownership snapshot that arrives on a compliance clock.
Bloomberg is reporting that Thiel and his Founders Fund have, in fact, fully exited the company, completing a simple arc that has been building for months.
Back in August 2025, the Palantir founder was a significant stakeholder. A Schedule 13D filing reported 11,592,241 shares and 7.5% beneficial ownership, with an event date of Aug. 4. The position then shrank. An amendment filed Nov. 14, reported 928,389 shares and 5.6% as of Sept. 30.
That sequence becomes more compelling when you remember what ETHZilla set out to represent: a public-market attempt to bottle the Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) playbook and pour it over Ethereum, with a Nasdaq ticker and a treasury story aimed at investors who prefer brokerages to wallets.
The filing that turns the rumor into a number
The Feb. 17 amendment is the crispest version of “fully exited” that public markets ever hand you, but it seems the shareholders had already priced this in after Thiel’s 2025 sales. Since August last year, ETHZ shares have declined by 95%, from around $74 to just over $3.50.
The company was clearly under pressure from more than insider selling. In a Jan. 2026 8-K, ETHZilla reported selling 3,965.83 ETH for $12.58 million at an average price of $3,173.67, and it disclosed a remaining balance of roughly 65,850 ETH. A month earlier, there was a much larger sale, about $74.5 million in ETH, tied to debt pressure and a step back from the pure treasury posture.
In a Feb. 2026 8-K, the company disclosed it redeemed all outstanding senior secured convertible notes, paying $516.148 million in principal and $87.745 million as a redemption premium, plus interest.
That is the sound of expensive capital in a market that has started pricing treasury-company structures with less patience.
All of this lands inside a wider story that has been forming across the category.
Crypto-treasury firms have been leaning on buybacks and leverage as equity prices sag, and that broader context gives Thiel’s “0.0%” a different kind of gravity.
The macro problem, carry looks thin and financing looks costly
A treasury strategy always ends up living inside the macro. In the easy phase of this trade, the equity trades at a premium to the underlying crypto, financing becomes the fuel, and the loop feeds itself. ETH has an extra layer here, because staking yield and derivatives carry become inputs in the spreadsheet.
Right now, those inputs read as modest cushions.
Public dashboards tracking ETH futures basis show annualized carry in the low single digits across maturities. Staking yield benchmarks sit in the same neighborhood, with one index around 2.8% annualized.
When the carry is thin, management decisions matter more. ETH sales matter more. Debt terms matter more. Equity issuance terms matter more. And the market starts treating the ticker as a judgment on execution rather than a simple proxy.
Treasury-company trades ultimately rest on the belief that a public wrapper can hold a volatile asset and remain stable when the market shifts. Thiel’s exit does not explain the why, yet it does plant a flag at the end of a timeline.
Three paths from here, and the numbers that will tell you which one you are in
It helps to name the forks in the road and attach each fork to a small set of observable signals.
- One path is a premium loop reopening. ETH stabilizes, risk appetite returns, and treasury companies regain room to finance growth without shrinking the core pile. The tells show up in the filings, fewer treasury reductions, cleaner raises, and a market willing to pay for exposure again.
- A second path is a discount trap. The equity trades as a chronic discount to the underlying holdings, and the company funds operations, acquisitions, and debt service by selling part of the pile. That version moves slowly, and it shows up as a steady drip of “treasury update” math.
- A third path is a reflexive unwind. A sharp ETH drawdown meets tight financing conditions, forced sales accelerate, and the equity starts behaving like a stress gauge. That version gets loud in headlines, and it usually leaves fingerprints in short windows of repeated balance sheet actions.
We can also use a simple numeric frame to keep the focus on reality. ETHZilla disclosed roughly 65,850 ETH remaining in its Jan. 2026 8-K. A prior disclosure trail noted 19,301,223 shares outstanding, and that share count gives us a rough way to translate ETH value into “per share” intuition.
At $2,000 ETH, 65,850 ETH comes to about $131.7 million of ETH value. Spread across 19.3 million shares, that lands around $6.80 per share in ETH value before cash, liabilities, operating burn, and other balance sheet items enter the picture.
At $1,500 ETH, the rough figure sits closer to $5.10. At $3,000 ETH, it rises to around $10.20. The point here is the sensitivity, small moves in ETH and small changes in financing terms can swing the story fast.
What to watch next, the filing breadcrumbs that keep this from becoming a one-day meme
Start with the ETH balance. The next time ETHZilla updates that number in an 8-K or a periodic report, direction matters, and magnitude matters.
Then watch the capital structure. The debt redemption disclosed in the Feb. 2026 8-K came with a large premium, and any replacement financing, equity issuance, or new structured instrument will tell you what kind of market access the company still has.
Then watch the strategy surface area. The more the company leans into adjacent bets and broader asset themes, the more the ticker becomes a view on management’s ability to keep a coherent story under pressure. That tension shows up in the company’s own prospectus language around shares and selling stockholders.
Finally, keep the macro dials in view, because they set the ceiling on how easy this trade can get. The futures basis curve and staking yield levels are not side trivia, they feed directly into how treasury-company strategies look on paper and how they feel in a drawdown.
A lot of crypto narratives end in vibes. This one ends in a line item, and the line item reads 0.0%. Thield’s conviction in this Ethereum treasury vehicle was short-lived, so the question becomes – what does he know that other Ethereum investors don’t? Was it poor investor relations with ETHZilla or a more broader issue with the business model?
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