Original title: (BitMine's Stock Price Skyrockets: Silicon Valley Venture Capitalist Peter Thiel's Bold Bet on Ethereum)
Original author: Zz, ChainCatcher
In July 2025, an SEC filing ignited the crypto sphere: an entity under Peter Thiel quietly acquired 9.1% of BitMine Immersion Technologies, becoming the largest investor in this Ethereum vault. Once the news broke, BitMine's stock price surged, hitting a peak of 29.3% during trading.
The X platform exploded: The PayPal mafia godfather has finally taken a shot at Ethereum, has Peter Thiel shifted from Bitcoin? Is this attempting to replicate MicroStrategy's playbook?
The market is so restless, it is not without reason. Just a year ago, Peter Thiel was publicly questioning Bitcoin: We already have ETFs, I don't know who else will come to buy. With institutional armies already entering the arena, who can drive the next wave? From Bitcoin to heavily investing in Ethereum, what game is this Silicon Valley billionaire really playing?
The ambition behind holding $1 billion worth of ETH
BitMine's ambitions are unabashed: to become the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy. On July 14, 2025, BitMine held Ethereum worth $500 million (163,142 ETH). Three days later, this number doubled to $1 billion, 300,657 ETH. Even in the crypto world, this accumulation speed is considered insane.
But what Peter Thiel is focused on is far more than just another corporate treasury. In 2023, one of Founders Fund's moves revealed his investment map: investing $200 million to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, each accounting for half. This allocation itself is a signal that Ethereum has already reached parity with Bitcoin.
In addition to the heavy blow of BitMine, Peter Thiel's layout in the Ethereum ecosystem has already quietly unfolded:
Trading infrastructure: In 2021, invested in Bullish Exchange, with Peter Thiel serving as a senior advisor.
Compliance infrastructure: Investing in Paxos (regulated stablecoin issuer) in 2024, continuing to increase stakes in 2025, participating in Ubyx, aiming to become the Visa of the stablecoin field.
DeFi infrastructure: Leading an investment in Avantis in June 2025, specializing in on-chain derivatives.
Layer-2 scaling: Investing in Caldera. When the mainnet gas fees remain high, Layer-2 is key to making DeFi truly usable.
Bitcoin is digital gold, while Ethereum is the new financial market. An investor close to Founders Fund revealed that for value storage, buying Bitcoin is enough. But to control future financial infrastructure, you need Ethereum.
This judgment is backed by evidence. When Bitcoin was still struggling between store of value vs. payment, Ethereum had already become: the main battlefield of DeFi (with locked value exceeding $100 billion), the preferred platform for stablecoins (USDT, USDC primarily circulate on Ethereum), and the foundational layer for tokenizing RWA (real-world assets).
More critically, Ethereum can generate interest. This is something Bitcoin cannot do. BitMine's Ethereum vault strategy is precisely aimed at this, allowing assets to generate cash flow.
Peter Thiel's ambitions do not stop there: Bullish Exchange secretly submitted an IPO (June 2025), supported the creation of Erebor Bank (planned to hold stablecoins), and took control of industry discourse through CoinDesk. The picture is clear: he is no longer satisfied with holding assets but wants to control the pipelines of asset flow.
The proportion of Ethereum in Founders Fund's blockchain portfolio is also gradually increasing. If 2014-2022 was Peter Thiel's Bitcoin era, focusing on value storage and ideological narratives, then after 2023, he officially enters the Ethereum era, building practically usable financial infrastructure.
Bitcoin has won the ideological war, but Ethereum will win practical applications. When central bank digital currencies, corporate stablecoins, and tokenized securities become a reality, they will all run on Ethereum.
Peter Thiel holds BitMine shares through various entities, not just investing, but preparing for control. If BitMine becomes the largest corporate Ethereum holder, Peter Thiel effectively becomes the shadow central bank of the Ethereum ecosystem. From PayPal to Bitcoin, to Ethereum, Peter Thiel's dream of a financial empire has never changed; only the tools have evolved.
The leading Founders Fund began building positions when Bitcoin was at $1,000.
When Bitcoin was still hovering around $1,000, Founders Fund had already begun building positions. According to insiders, the initial investment reached tens of millions of dollars, which was considered aggressive among institutional investors at the time.
But Peter Thiel's ambitions do not stop there. In 2013, he invested in Block.one (which later developed EOS). Although EOS ultimately failed to shake Ethereum, this investment exposed his true intentions: he was not after Bitcoin itself, but the next Bitcoin.
More intriguingly is his layout path:
Mining side: Investing in BitMine in 2025 is just the latest move. As early as 2018, he participated in Layer1 financing.
Trading side: Before Bullish, he was an early investor in Kraken. Compared to Coinbase's compliance route, Kraken maintains a more cypherpunk style, which is very Peter Thiel.
Infrastructure: In 2021, when everyone was chasing DeFi tokens, Founders Fund quietly invested in Voltage to provide infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
Peter Thiel's understanding of Bitcoin goes far beyond just digital gold. In April 2021, he proposed in a conversation with former Secretary of State Pompeo: Bitcoin may be a financial weapon used by China to undermine the dollar.
The crypto community was in an uproar. Supporters called him a traitor, and opponents accused him of conspiracy theories. However, placing this statement within Peter Thiel's overall thought system makes the logic clear: Bitcoin is not just an investment product, but a geopolitical tool that can take the initiative in the new financial war.
Interestingly, just a year later, he changed his tune at a Bitcoin conference, describing it as a revolutionary weapon against financial gerontocracy. He even listed his enemies: Buffett, BlackRock's Larry Fink, and JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon.
Facing conservatives, he talks about national security. Facing the crypto community, he talks about a freedom revolution. What remains unchanged is the core goal: to promote a new order independent of the traditional financial system. This precisely showcases Peter Thiel's core trait: using narrative as a weapon.
The results are significant: timely liquidating before the 2022 crypto winter, profiting $1.8 billion; in 2023, when Bitcoin dropped to $30,000, he re-entered the market, buying $100 million. A textbook example of high selling and low buying.
A noteworthy detail: In July 2024, when Bitcoin ETFs were launched and institutional funds flooded in, Peter Thiel publicly stated he was uncertain it would see significant price increases from here. The real weapons are never ETFs that everyone can buy.
Behind all these layouts is an unfinished monetary dream.
Opening the Founders Fund portfolio, the patterns are clear: almost no investment in DApps, no touch on GameFi, and only a taste of NFTs. What he is truly interested in is: Layer2 scaling solutions (Caldera), compliant infrastructure (Paxos), derivatives protocols (Avantis), and stablecoin networks (Ubyx). Protocols are preferred over products; this is Peter Thiel's creed.
Time travels back to 1998, when 23-year-old Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal. What was their initial vision? Not to create a payment tool, but to create a new form of currency.
As early as ten years before Bitcoin's birth, Peter Thiel was contemplating how to disrupt the currency system. PayPal even developed a PalmPilot application in its early days that could transmit digital cash via infrared. Ultimately, due to regulatory pressure, it had to transform into a traditional payment company.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for $1.5 billion. The first thing Peter Thiel did after cashing out: founded Clarium Capital, systematically looking for the next monetary revolution opportunity. He waited 12 years.
In 2014, when Peter Thiel first studied Bitcoin seriously, he did not see it as electronic cash, but as PayPal's unfinished dream. We live in a world where Bitcoin is unregulated while atoms are regulated. In 2015, Peter Thiel summarized this. The subtext is: In the digital world, you can build anything, including a whole new financial system.
In (From 0 to 1), Peter Thiel repeatedly emphasizes: Competition is a game for losers; monopoly is what brings excess profits. PayPal's experience taught him: establishing a financial monopoly in the traditional world is almost impossible. Regulation will stifle you, and big banks will encircle you. Cryptocurrency has changed the rules of the game.
How to establish a monopoly in a decentralized world? The answer is: control the underlying infrastructure. When everyone is building on Ethereum, owning Ethereum is equivalent to collecting rent. When all transactions require stablecoins, controlling stablecoin protocols is equivalent to printing money. When regulation finally arrives, owning compliant licenses means holding the ticket to entry.
Peter Thiel even funded key figures in this revolution. In 2014, his Peter Thiel Fellowship gave $100,000 to 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin, prompting him to drop out of the University of Waterloo to develop Ethereum full-time. In a sense, Peter Thiel not only invested in the infrastructure but also in the people building the infrastructure.
This explains why Peter Thiel is simultaneously laying out Erebor Bank (traditional license) and DeFi protocols (decentralized finance). No matter which path the future takes, he is a winner. A deeper reason may be: in his view, cryptocurrency is not PayPal 2.0, but what PayPal should have become: a truly free global financial system not controlled by any government.
Now, Peter Thiel's crypto empire has taken shape.
In 2025, Peter Thiel is no longer satisfied with being a passive holder of coins. Through BitMine, Bullish, and Erebor, he is building a complete crypto financial empire.
As I write this, a question arises: Why is Peter Thiel so radical while traditional financial giants are still observing? Perhaps the answer lies in his 2015 statement: We live in a world where Bitcoin is unregulated while atoms are regulated.
For Peter Thiel, cryptocurrency is not just a financial revolution, but the ultimate tool for building an unregulated Bitcoin world. Now is the time to place bets.
After all, as his friend, Tesla CEO Musk said: The best risks are calculated risks. In the ultimate adventure of cryptocurrency, Peter Thiel's calculations have just begun.
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