Peter Thiel and entities associated with Founders Fund have completely exited ETHZilla, a publicly traded Ethereum treasury trading business that once marketed itself as a proxy bet on corporate ETH accumulation. Schedule 13G/A filed on Tuesday shows the reporting group ended 2025 with no common stock remaining, clearing out positions that were notable in both the crypto and small-cap worlds.
Teal Exists Ethereum Treasury Play
The amended return, dated February 17, 2026, is unusually candid about its current footprint: “Total amount…0.00. Class percentage…0.0%. Class ownership less than 5 percent.” The position is reported as of December 31, 2025, meaning the withdrawal is complete by the end of the year.
Peter Thiel leaves Ethereum on date “ETHZILLA” $ETHZ Tokenized Jet Engine Focus: Filing pic.twitter.com/nnMeT32LQ4
— AggrNews (@AggrNews) February 18, 2026
This zeroed-out item is in sharp contrast to what Teal Related Vehicles disclosed just a quarter ago. On the previous Schedule 13G/A, which reports holdings as of September 30, 2025, Teal was listed with 928,389 shares beneficially owned, representing 5.6% of the class at the time, with an additional block vested in Founders Fund entities. The filing states that the company conducted a 10:1 reverse stock split on October 20, 2025, and the number of reported shares was adjusted accordingly.
The ETHZilla story is important because it sought to transform the Bitcoin financial template into an ETH-native wrapper at a time when public market instruments were being touted as a liquid and leverageable gateway to digital asset exposure. Thiel’s initial involvement, which was widely reported as a 7.5% stake that went public in August 2025, helped legitimize the pitch, at least temporarily.
More recently, ETHZilla has signaled a shift from a pure ETH financial identity to tokenized real-world assets, including aviation. In an 8-K associated with the Feb. 12 press release, the company said its subsidiary had launched “Eurus Aero Token I,” which it described as a “tokenized real-world asset product” that provides exposure to aircraft engines in lease contracts “through tradable digital tokens representing contractual revenue rights.”
This turn of events leaves traders with uncomfortable unanswered questions. Did Founders Fund’s exit precede (and implicitly be at the forefront of) a strategic shift, or was it simply a portfolio cleanup after the initial “ETH treasury” story cooled down?
At X, one commentator framed Mr. Thiel’s timing as part of a broader pattern, although some of the post’s claims go beyond what the SEC filing says. The account @treebook78 called Mr. Thiel a “master of crisis detection,” wrote that he “avoided this sharp decline,” and claimed that he is a “master of exits” who can get out early when bubbles and stress rise.
“Back in 2022, he posted a diamond hand on social media telling people to hold on to their Bitcoin forever, but then he quietly sold everything and avoided the Luna crash and FTX collapse (as I recall),” @treebook78 wrote.
At the time of writing, Ethereum was trading at $1,984.
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