BitMine's stock price soars: Silicon Valley venture capital godfather bets big on Ethereum

In July 2025, an SEC document set off the crypto circle: Peter Thiel's entity quietly took 9.1% of BitMine Immersion Technologies' shares, becoming the largest investor in the Ethereum vault. As soon as the news came out, BitMine's stock price soared, reaching a high of 29.3% during the session.

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The market is so restless, and it is not groundless. Just a year ago, Peter Thiel was still publicly questioning Bitcoin: We already have ETFs, and I don't know who else will buy them. When the institutional army has entered the market, who can still drive the next wave? From Bitcoin to Ethereum, what is this Silicon Valley billionaire playing?

The ambition behind holding $1 billion worth of ETH

BitMine's ambition is undisguised: to become the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy. On July 14, 2025, BitMine held $500 million worth of Ethereum (163,142 ETH). Three days later, the number doubled to $1 billion and 300,657 ETH. Even in the crypto world, this accumulation speed is crazy.

But Peter Thiel is eyeing far more than just another corporate treasury. In 2023, Founders Fund's move exposed his investment map: investing $200 million to buy Bitcoin and Ethereum, each accounting for half. This configuration itself is a signal that Ethereum is on par with Bitcoin.

In addition to BitMine's heavy punch, Peter Thiel's layout in the Ethereum ecosystem has already quietly begun:

Transaction infrastructure: Invest in Bullish Exchange in 2021, and Peter Thiel personally serves as a senior advisor.

Compliance infrastructure: Invest in Paxos (a regulated stablecoin issuer) in 2024, and continue to increase investment in Ubyx in 2025, aiming to be the Visa in the stablecoin field.

DeFi infrastructure: Lead investment in Avantis in June 2025, specializing in on-chain derivatives.

Layer-2 expansion: Invest in Caldera. When the mainnet gas fee remains high, Layer-2 is the key to making DeFi truly usable.

Bitcoin is digital gold, and Ethereum is a new financial market. An investor close to Founders Fund revealed that it is enough to store value and buy Bitcoin. But to control the future financial infrastructure, you need Ethereum.

This judgment is well-founded. While Bitcoin is still struggling with the value storage vs. payment, Ethereum has become: the main battlefield of DeFi (locked value exceeds 100 billion US dollars), the preferred platform for stablecoins (USDT and USDC are mainly circulated on Ethereum), and the base layer for the tokenization of RWA (real world assets). More importantly, Ethereum can generate interest. This is something Bitcoin cannot do. BitMine's Ethereum vault strategy is aimed at this point, allowing assets to generate cash flow. Peter Thiel's ambitions are more than that: Bullish Exchange secretly submitted an IPO (June 2025), supported the creation of the Erebor Bank (planned to hold stablecoins) dedicated to serving crypto companies, and controlled the industry's discourse through CoinDesk. The picture is clear: he is no longer satisfied with holding assets, but wants to control the channels for asset flow.

The proportion of Ethereum ecosystem in Founders Fund's blockchain investment portfolio is also gradually rising. If 2014-2022 is Peter Thiel's Bitcoin era, focusing on value storage and ideological narratives, then after 2023, he officially entered the Ethereum era to build a practical financial infrastructure.

Bitcoin won the ideological war, but Ethereum will win the practical application. 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 also preparing for control. If BitMine becomes the largest corporate Ethereum holder, Peter Thiel will actually become the shadow central bank of the Ethereum ecosystem. From PayPal to Bitcoin and then to Ethereum, Peter Thiel's dream of a financial empire has never changed, only the tools are constantly evolving.

Founders Fund, which he led, began to build a position when Bitcoin was $1,000

When Bitcoin was still hovering at $1,000, Founders Fund had already begun to build a position. According to insiders, the first investment reached tens of millions of dollars, which was considered radical among institutional investors at the time.

But Peter Thiel's ambitions go beyond this. In 2013, he invested in Block.one (which later developed EOS). Although EOS ultimately failed to shake Ethereum, this investment exposed his true intention: he did not want Bitcoin itself, but the next Bitcoin.

What is more intriguing is his layout path:

Mining side: Investing in BitMine in 2025 is just the latest move. As early as 2018, it participated in Layer1's financing.

Trading side: Before Bullish, it was an early investor in Kraken. Compared with 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 is far more than just digital gold. In April 2021, he put forward the view in a conversation with former Secretary of State Pompeo: Bitcoin may be a financial weapon used by China to weaken the US dollar.

The currency circle was in an uproar. Supporters called him a traitor, and opponents called him a conspiracy theorist. However, putting this passage in Peter Thiel's overall ideological system, the logic is clear: Bitcoin is not only an investment product, but also a geopolitical tool. It can take the initiative in the new financial war.

Interestingly, just one year later, he changed his tune at the Bitcoin conference, describing it as a revolutionary weapon against financial gerontocracy. He even listed his enemies: Buffett, BlackRock's Larry Fink, and JPMorgan Chase's Jamie Dimon.

Facing conservatives, he talked about national security. Facing the crypto community, he talked about the liberal revolution. What remains unchanged is the core goal: to promote a new order independent of the traditional financial system. This precisely shows Peter Thiel's core trait: using narrative as a weapon.

The results are remarkable: he liquidated his positions in time before the crypto winter in 2022, making a profit of $1.8 billion; when Bitcoin fell to $30,000 in 2023, he took action again and bought $100 million. Textbook-level high-selling and low-buying.

Interesting details: In July 2024, when the Bitcoin ETF was launched and institutional funds entered the market in large numbers, Peter Thiel publicly stated that he was not sure it would rise much from here. The real weapon will never be an ETF that everyone can buy.

Behind all the layouts is the unfinished dream of currency

Looking at the investment portfolio of Founders Fund, the rules are clear: almost no investment in DApp, no touch of GameFi, and only a superficial taste of NFT. What really interests me are: Layer2 expansion solutions (Caldera), compliance infrastructure (Paxos), derivatives protocols (Avantis), and stablecoin networks (Ubyx). Protocols are better than products, this is Peter Thiel's creed.

Back in 1998, when 23-year-old Peter Thiel and Max Levchin founded PayPal, what was their original vision? Not to be a payment tool, but to create a new form of currency.

Ten years before the birth of Bitcoin, Peter Thiel was thinking about how to subvert the monetary system. PayPal even developed a PalmPilot application in its early days that could transmit digital cash via infrared. Eventually, 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 was to establish Clarium Capital and systematically look for the next opportunity for currency revolution. He waited for 12 years.

In 2014, when Peter Thiel first seriously studied Bitcoin, what he saw was not electronic cash, but PayPal's unfulfilled dream. We live in a world where bits are not regulated but atoms are regulated. In 2015, Peter Thiel summed it up this way. The subtext is: in the digital world, you can build anything, including a completely new financial system.

In "From 0 to 1", Peter Thiel repeatedly emphasized that competition is a loser's game, and only monopoly can bring excess profits. PayPal's experience taught him that it is almost impossible to establish a financial monopoly in the traditional world. 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 builds 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 comes, owning a compliance license is equivalent to holding an entry ticket.

Peter Thiel even funded the key figures of this revolution. In 2014, his Peter Thiel Fellowship gave 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin $100,000, which made him decide to drop out of the University of Waterloo and develop Ethereum full-time. In a sense, Peter Thiel not only invested in infrastructure, but also invested in the people who built the infrastructure.

This explains why Peter Thiel wants to lay out both Erebor Bank (traditional license) and DeFi protocol (decentralized finance). No matter which path he takes in the future, he will be the winner. The deeper reason may be: in his view, cryptocurrency is not PayPal 2.0, but what PayPal should be, a truly free global financial system that is not controlled by any government.

Now, Peter Thiel's crypto empire has taken shape

Peter Thiel in 2025 is no longer satisfied with being a passive coin holder. Through BitMine, Bullish, and Erebor, he is building a complete crypto financial empire.

At this point, a question emerges: Why is Peter Thiel so radical when traditional financial giants are still watching? Perhaps the answer is hidden in his words in 2015: We live in a world where bits are unregulated and atoms are regulated.

For Peter Thiel, cryptocurrency is not only a financial revolution, but also the ultimate tool for building an unregulated bit world. Now is the time to bet.

After all, as his good friend, Tesla CEO Musk said: The best adventure is a calculated adventure. In the ultimate adventure of cryptocurrency, Peter Thiel's calculations have just begun.