Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund bets on ETHZilla, while Thiel-staked BitMine announces $24.5 billion fundraise

Ethereum is attempting to overtake its all-time high price as its ongoing rally intensifies and institutional bets pile up. 

Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund acquired a 7.5% stake in ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla Corporation, a rebrand of 180 Life Sciences, according to a filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission signed by Thiel on Monday. Shares of the company have skyrocketed, increasing over 65% on the news.

ETHZilla announced holding a total of 82,186 tokens, or $357.7 million at current prices, making it the fifth-largest ethereum corporate treasury firm, per StrategicETHReserve.xyz. 

“The most recently purchased ETH is expected to be held long-term and staked to Electric Capital’s own proprietary ethereum network strategies to generate yield,” a press release stated. The annualized staking yield for network validators stands at almost 3%, data from CoinDesk Indices shows. 

BitMine sizing up

Thiel’s involvement in ETHZilla comes nearly one month after a different SEC filing showed that Founders Fund bought a 9.1% stake in BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest ethereum treasury firm, which recently announced holding nearly $5 billion in tokens. 

BitMine also filed a prospectus supplement with the SEC that would allow the company to raise up to $24.5 billion by offering shares of its common stock over time. That would increase its at-the-market equity offering by $20 billion, which represents a “5x increase in issuance capacity,” VanEck Head of Digital Assets Research Matthew Sigel said in a post on X. 

BitMine aims to use the net proceeds from the sales for general corporate purposes, if any, as well as to fund acquisitions of businesses, assets, or technologies that complement its current business. 

“We view our Ethereum treasury operations as the next phase of our business growth,” the Tuesday filing stated. “Our Treasury strategy will be focused on engaging in opportunity seeking activities with the goal of increasing the amount of ETH in the Treasury, including through staking, restaking, liquid staking and other decentralized finance activities.”

BitMine intends to accumulate 5% of ethereum’s total supply, which translates to roughly 6 million tokens worth $26.5 billion. 

Spot ethereum ETFs make a new record

The moves come in the wake of spot ethereum ETFs in the US recording over $1 billion in daily inflows for the first time, with BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF and Fidelity’s Ethereum Fund accounting for about 90% of Monday’s total, per SoSoValue. The inflows into the ethereum investment vehicles were multiples higher than Monday’s inflows into spot bitcoin ETFs, which sat at $178 million.

The price of the second-largest cryptocurrency has jumped 5.2% in the last 24 hours and 32.7% this year to trade just under $4,400, closing in on the all-time high set in 2021. Ethereum’s climb in both time frames has outperformed bitcoin’s.

Finally, one unidentified whale (0x395) scooped up 21,000 ethereum tokens worth $90.3 million in the early hours of Tuesday, bringing its on-chain portfolio to roughly $378 million, according to on-chain data pulled from blockchain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence.