Tech billionaire Peter Thiel is backing yet one more Ethereum treasury firm—and the corporate’s inventory has tripled in value on the event.
Based on a latest SEC filing, Thiel and associated entities he manages bought a 7.5% stake in 180 Life Sciences, a biotech firm as soon as centered on researching inflammatory illnesses that not too long ago pivoted to stockpiling Ethereum and rebranded to “ETHZilla.”
After phrase of Thiel’s funding circulated Tuesday, the corporate’s inventory exploded, greater than tripling in worth in a matter of hours. It closed the day buying and selling at $10.24, up practically 207% from its shut at $3.34 on Monday afternoon.
Simply weeks in the past, Thiel and the enterprise capital agency he co-founded, Founders Fund, purchased a 9.1% stake in one other publicly traded firm that has gone all in on shopping for up as a lot Ethereum as doable: BitMine.
That firm, which beforehand centered on Bitcoin mining, has now collected over $5 billion worth of ETH, and plans to raise more than $20 billion to continue to grow that industry-leading stash.
Thiel and his enterprise funds have been deeply concerned in crypto for years, backing quite a few blockchain ventures starting from centralized exchanges together with Bullish and Bitpanda, to whole networks like Ethereum layer-2 Layer N, to prediction market Polymarket.
Thiel, a PayPal and Palantir co-founder, has lengthy been a serious funder of far-right wing political candidates, and has performed a vital function in shaping the tech coverage of the present Trump administration.
It was Thiel who first introduced Vice President JD Vance, certainly one of his former workers, to Trump in 2021. Thiel’s longtime pal and enterprise associate, David Sacks, at the moment serves because the president’s AI and crypto czar; Michael Kratsios, Thiel’s former chief of workers, heads the White Home’s Workplace of Science and Know-how.
Peter Thiel Bets Big on Ethereum, Buys Stake in Treasury Firm Chaired by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee
The second Trump administration has aggressively pursued insurance policies favorable to the crypto {industry} since January, together with those who have hastened the mixing of digital property with conventional monetary markets.
An executive order signed by the president final week, for instance, greenlit the power for 401(ok) accounts to realize publicity to cryptocurrencies. Particularly, it permitted them to spend money on actively managed funding autos investing in digital property.
Thiel’s curiosity in Ethereum and its co-founder Vitalik Buterin stretches again greater than a decade, as Founders Fund awarded Buterin a $100,000 grant in 2014, serving to allow improvement on the protocol.
