Entities linked to Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund have completely withdrawn from ETHZilla, a publicly traded Ethereum treasury that was once marketed as a proxy bet for corporate ETH accumulation. According to a Schedule 13G/A filed on Tuesday, the reporting group ended 2025 with no common stock remaining, eliminating closely watched positions in both the cryptocurrency and small-cap stock markets.
Thiel has an Ethereum Treasury Play.
The revised filing, dated February 17, 2026, expresses the current footprint unusually bluntly: “Total… 0.00. Class percentage… 0.0%. Class ownership less than 5%.” The position will be reported as of December 31, 2025, which means the exit will be complete by the end of the year.
Peter THIEL Quits Ethereum DAT “ETHZILLA” AMID $ETHZ Tokenized Jet Engine Focus: Submission pic.twitter.com/nnMeT32LQ4
— Aggr News (@AggrNews) February 18, 2026
That zeroed-out entry stands in sharp contrast to what Thiel-related vehicles revealed just a quarter ago. As of September 30, 2025, in the previous Schedule 13G/A reporting holdings, Thiel was listed with beneficial ownership of 928,389 shares, representing 5.6% of the class at that time, with an additional block attributed to Founders Fund entities. The same filing states that the company’s 1-for-10 reverse stock split is effective October 20, 2025, and the reported share count has been adjusted accordingly.
ETHZilla’s story is important because it attempted to transform the Bitcoin treasury template into an ETH native wrapper at a moment when the public market vehicle was presented as a liquid and exploitable on-ramp to digital asset exposure. Thiel’s initial involvement, widely seen as a 7.5% stake disclosed in August 2025, helped legitimize the pitch, at least for a moment.
Recently, ETHZilla is signaling a shift from pure ETH financial identity to tokenized real-world assets, including aviation. In an 8-K related to the Feb. 12 press release, the company said its subsidiary had launched the “Eurus Aero Token I,” which it described as a “tokenized real-asset instrument” that provides exposure to leased aircraft engines “via tradable digital tokens representing contractual revenue rights.”
The order leaves traders with uncomfortable and unresolved questions. Did the exit of the Founders Fund precede (and implicitly preempt) a change in strategy, or was it simply a portfolio cleanup after the initial “ETH Treasury” narrative cooled?
One commenter on X framed Thiel’s timing as part of a broader pattern, but some of the post’s claims go beyond the SEC filing. The @treebook78 account called Thiel a “master of crisis detection” and claimed he was a “master of exit” who got out early when bubbles or stress were building, writing that he “avoided this current downturn as well.”
“In 2022, he put up a diamond hand on social media telling people to hold their Bitcoin forever, but then quietly sold everything, avoiding the Luna collapse and the FTX collapse,” @treebook78 wrote.
At press time, Ethereum was trading at $1,984.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
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