Peter Thiel and the organizations tied to the Founders Fund have fully exited ETHZilla, a publicly traded Ethereum game that once marketed itself as a proxy bet on corporate ETH accumulation. A Schedule 13G/A filed Tuesday shows the reporting group ended 2025 with no common shares outstanding, erasing a position that had been closely watched in both crypto and small-cap circles.
Thiel Has Ethereum Treasury Play
Amended filing, dated Feb. 17, 2026, is unusually vague in the current edition: “Aggregate total… 0.00. Class percentage… 0.0%. Ownership of 5 percent or less of the class.” Positions are reported as of Dec. 31, 2025, which means the exit is completed by the end of the year.
PETER THIEL LEAVES ETHEREUM THE SUN IS “SETTING” IN THE MIDDLE $ETHZ JET FOCUS ENGINE TOKENIZED: FLYING pic.twitter.com/nnMeT32LQ4
– Aggr News (@AggrNews) February 18, 2026
That zero-output line item is very different from what Thiel-related vehicles showed in the first quarter. In the previous Schedule 13G/A reporting of holdings from Sept. 30, 2025, Thiel was listed with 928,389 shares beneficially owned, representing 5.6% of the class at that time, and additional blocks attributed to Founders Fund companies. The same filing noted the company’s 1-for-10 stock split retroactive to October 20, 2025, with the reported dividend count adjusted accordingly.
ETHZilla’s story is important because it attempted to translate the Bitcoin treasury template into an ETH-native wrapper at a time when public market vehicles were being mounted as liquid on-ramps to digital asset exposure. Thiel’s initial involvement, widely reported as a 7.5% stake disclosed in August 2025, helped confirm that claim, at least for a while.
Lately, ETHZilla has been signaling a pivot away from pure ETH-treasury ownership and towards tokenized real-world assets, including aviation. In an 8-K accompanying press release on Feb. 12, the company said its subsidiary launched the “Eurus Aero Token I,” describing it as a “tokenized real-world asset instrument” that provides exposure to aircraft engines on lease with “tradable digital tokens representing rights to contractual income.”
This sequence leaves traders with an uncomfortable, unresolved question: did the exit of the Founders Fund precede (and apparently precede) a strategic change, or was it simply a portfolio cleanup after the initial “ETH fortune” narrative cooled?
At X, one analyst included Thiel’s tenure as part of a broader pattern, though several of the post’s claims go beyond what’s in the SEC filing. The @treebook78 account called Thiel “a master at sensing problems,” writing that he has “avoided this current dip,” and arguing that he is an “exit master” who gets out early when bubbles or pressures form.
“Back in 2022, he posted diamond hands on SNS telling people to hold Bitcoin forever, but then he quietly sold everything and avoided the Luna crash and FTX crash (as I recall),” wrote @treebook78.
At press time, Ethereum traded at $1,984.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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