“Look guys, this is just a temporary setback, I promise we’re not broke…” -Peter Thiel to ETHZilla shareholders after having to dump his crypto wallet to pay the holiday credit card bill

While Peter Thiel was out there watching Thiel-backed Bullish rip faces off in its IPO, another one of his crypto-adjacent bets just did the financial equivalent of pawning the Xbox to make rent.

In case you can’t tell, I’m talking about ETHZilla (-15%)… the former biotech company that reinvented itself as an Ether-hoarding digital asset treasury and briefly convinced the market it was Michael Saylor, but with better branding and way less Bitcoin.

Fast forward four months, and ole Peter Thiel ain’t acting quite as tough.

ETHZilla just disclosed it sold $74.5 million worth of Ethereum to pay down debt. Not to “optimize capital structure.” Not to “reposition liquidity.” Just straight up: we owed money, so we sold the magic internet coins.

(Source: Coin Telegraph)

Specifically, the company dumped 24,291 ETH to redeem senior secured convertible notes. After the sale, it still holds 69,802 ETH, worth about $207 million at current prices… which sounds impressive until you remember the whole strategy was supposed to be number go up, not sell the bag to keep the lights on.

The market responded exactly how you’d expect. Shares of ETHZ fell hard, down about 7.6% on the day, and are now off more than 26% over the past six months. Shockingly, investors are getting a little skittish that their so-called “crypto treasury” is starting to behave like a distressed pawn shop.

And this wasn’t even the first time.

Back in October, ETHZilla already sold $40 million worth of ETH as part of a stock buyback plan… which is a sentence that should probably never exist in the same paragraph.

Meanwhile, Ethereum itself hasn’t been doing ETHZilla any favors, down roughly 28% over the last three months. Using ETH as a balance-sheet strategy works great… until it doesn’t. Ask anyone who tried to explain “temporary volatility” to a lender.

For context, this whole saga started when ETHZilla (formerly 180 Life Sciences) raised $425 million via PIPE and pivoted from biotech to crypto accumulation, hoping to copy the playbook of Michael Saylor and his Bitcoin-first empire.

The difference? Saylor never sold the Bitcoin to pay the credit card bill.

Now ETHZilla is officially changing the story again. The company says its future value will come from real-world asset (RWA) tokenization… things like auto loans, manufactured housing, aerospace equipment, and real estate. In other words: revenue, cash flow, and stuff lenders actually understand.

Translation: the ETH-hoarding era is over. The company is sobering up, putting on a tie, and trying to convince Wall Street it’s a real business now.

So yeah… Peter Thiel’s track record is still elite.

But ETHZilla? That one’s officially in “prove you’re not broke” mode.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Ethereum and Bitcoin as mentioned in the article.