Peter Thiel's Founders Fund dumps every ETHZilla share

Digital asset treasury firms that focus on token investments seem to have fallen out of favor with investors.

ETHZilla, a crypto treasury firm based in Palm Beach, mimics Michael Saylor's bitcoin hoarding firm Strategy (MSTR), saw Billionaire entrepreneur and co-founder of PayPal and Palantir Technologies, Peter Thiel's venture wiping its slate clean of ETHZilla. The fund sold every last share of the ether-hoarding digital asset treasury firm by the end of the last year, a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission shows.

The move is a complete turnaround for the Founders Fund, as its stake went from 7.5% earlier in August of last year to a big fat zero within a few months.

Crypto treasury panic

ETHZilla started as a failed biotech stock called 180 Life Sciences, before pivoting hard to the Ethereum (ETH) treasury, amassing over 100,000 ETH tokens at its peak.

While the filings don't show the price or timing of buying and selling, when Founders Fund first disclosed its stake in the stock, the stock was soaring, hitting an all-time high of nearly $107 in August. At the time, investors were piling into crypto treasury stocks, and many companies jumped on the Michael Saylor-style treasury bandwagon to cash in on the hype.

Since then, however, the bubble has burst, and many high-flying crypto treasury or digital asset treasury (DAT) stocks have lost most of their shine. In fact, ETHZilla panicked-sold $40 million of ether in October and then $74.5 million more in December to reduce debt from convertible notes.

And the price of the ETHZilla's shares on Dec. 30? A mere $4.99 each, marking a 95% value destruction from its summer peak.

In fact, the deflating bubble for DATs prompted the firm to pivot hard again, spinning out ETHZilla Aerospace in February of this year to offer investors tokenized slices of leased jet engines.

UPDATE (Feb. 18, 6:41pm UTC): Updates story throughout to add more context.