Peter Thiel and entities tied to Founders Fund have totally exited ETHZilla, the publicly traded Ethereum treasury play that when marketed itself as a proxy wager on company ETH accumulation. A Schedule 13G/A filed Tuesday exhibits the reporting group completed 2025 with no remaining widespread shares, wiping out a place that had been intently watched throughout each crypto and small-cap fairness circles.
Thiel Exists Ethereum Treasury Play
The amended submitting, dated Feb. 17, 2026, is unusually blunt on the present footprint: “Combination quantity… 0.00. % of sophistication… 0.0%. Possession of 5 % or much less of a category.” The positions are reported as of Dec. 31, 2025, which means the exit was accomplished by year-end.
PETER THIEL EXITS ETHEREUM DAT “ETHZILLA” AMID $ETHZ TOKENIZED JET ENGINE FOCUS: FILING pic.twitter.com/nnMeT32LQ4
— Aggr Information (@AggrNews) February 18, 2026
That zeroed-out line merchandise is a pointy distinction to what Thiel-related automobiles disclosed only a quarter earlier. In a previous Schedule 13G/A reporting holdings as of Sept. 30, 2025, Thiel was listed with 928,389 shares beneficially owned, representing 5.6% of the category at the moment, with further blocks attributed to Founders Fund entities. The identical submitting famous the corporate’s 1-for-10 reverse inventory break up efficient Oct. 20, 2025, with reported share counts adjusted accordingly.
ETHZilla’s story arc issues as a result of it tried to translate the Bitcoin treasury template into an ETH-native wrapper at a second when public-market automobiles had been being pitched as liquid, leverable on-ramps to digital asset publicity. Thiel’s preliminary involvement, broadly reported as a 7.5% stake disclosed in August 2025, helped legitimize that pitch, not less than briefly.
Extra just lately, ETHZilla has been signaling a pivot away from a pure ETH-treasury identification and towards tokenized real-world belongings, together with aviation. In an 8-Ok tied to a Feb. 12 press launch, the corporate mentioned its subsidiary launched “Eurus Aero Token I,” describing it as “a tokenized real-world asset instrument” that provides publicity to plane engines on lease “by way of tradable digital tokens representing contractual income rights.”
The sequencing leaves merchants with an uncomfortable, unresolved query: did Founders Fund’s exit precede (and implicitly front-run) the technique shift, or was it merely a portfolio cleanup after the preliminary “ETH treasury” narrative cooled?
On X, one commentator framed Thiel’s timing as a part of a broader sample, although a number of of the put up’s claims transcend what’s within the SEC submitting. The account @treebook78 known as Thiel a “grasp at sensing crises,” writing that he “dodged this present dip too,” and arguing he’s an “exit grasp” who will get out early when bubbles or stress construct.
“Again in 2022, he posted diamond arms on SNS telling individuals to carry Bitcoin perpetually, however then he quietly bought the whole lot and prevented the Luna crash and FTX collapse (as I recall),” @treebook78 wrote.
At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,984.
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