Did Peter Thiel’s Latest Move Open the Door for Institutions to FINALLY Pile Into Ethereum?

By Stocks News   |   1 week ago   |   Stock Market News
Did Peter Thiel’s Latest Move Open the Door for Institutions to FINALLY Pile Into Ethereum?

Palantir used to be one of the rare tech companies without a full-blown hate cult… unless you count the Wall Street shortsellers still nursing bruised egos after Alex Karp called them “crackheads” on an earnings call (which, let’s be honest, was a highlight reel moment). But lately, the backlash has been brewing. The company’s been collecting government surveillance contracts like Leonardo DiCaprio collects 23 year old girlfriends: ICE, the Pentagon, probably a few alphabet agencies operating out of an unmarked basement in Virginia. If there’s a department with a budget, a badge, and a desire to track something, Palantir’s already on the payroll… and probably two versions ahead on the software.

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(Source: Democracy Now!)

Tensions boiled over recently when a group of protestors chained themselves to Palantir’s London office, shouting about “digital authoritarianism” and “surveillance capitalism” (yeah that’ll show them). And just when it looked like the Twitter pitchforks might cool off… Peter Thiel (Palantir co-founder and PayPal OG) decided to throw another log on the fire.

Last night, Thiel’s venture firm, Founders Fund, disclosed it had taken a 9.1% stake in Bitmine Immersion Technologies… a company that, until about five minutes ago, was best known for plugging in Bitcoin mining rigs and hoping Elon Musk wouldn’t tweet them into bankruptcy. Today, Bitmine is pitching itself as the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy (how original).

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That shift started back in June, when Bitmine raised $250 million in a private placement and hit the reset button on its entire business model. Instead of doubling down on Bitcoin mining, they went all-in on Ethereum… buying 163,000 ETH and 154 Bitcoin to turn their balance sheet into a digital vault. Then they tapped Tom Lee from Fundstrat to lend them some institutional credibility (and possibly to say “I’m bullish” on live TV until the price can’t go any higher).

Again, this was more than a light refresh… Bitmine stopped trying to mine coins and instead chose the “just own a mountain of crypto and look smart” strategy. Meaning: they turned themselves into a public company-sized ETH wallet and hoped the market would reward them for it.

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And so far, it’s paying off. Since the strategy switch, Bitmine’s stock is up more than 900%, taking the company from an obscure micro-cap to a nearly $2 billion valuation. That run got even hotter today when Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund disclosed a 9.1% stake in the company. As of now the stock’s up 18% today alone.

Don’t miss the forest for the trees in this story though. Thiel’s move is a signal flare… real money is rotating back into Ethereum, not through shady altcoins or Telegram groups, but through public equities. Bitmine is now a proxy play for institutional ETH exposure, and investors are treating it as such.

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The timing’s no accident either. Ethereum has doubled in the past three months, thanks to regulatory progress (finally), Robinhood’s plan to tokenize stocks in Europe (because of course they are), and Circle’s IPO making stablecoins feel almost respectable. Even Congress is flirting with the GENIUS Act… a stablecoin bill with a name that sounds like it came from a high school business club but might actually bring clarity to the crypto space.

And all of this matters because it sets the stage for something we haven’t seen in a while: Ethereum making a real push to come back. After two years of trailing behind Bitcoin and getting overlooked in favor of faster, cheaper alternatives like Solana and the growing crowd of layer-2 solutions, ETH is finally starting to regain attention.

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Bitmine’s strategy switch (and Thiel’s investment) did far more than just move a stock. It added real weight to the idea that Ethereum is positioning itself for a stronger, more serious role in the next phase of crypto adoption.

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

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