ETHZilla stock jumps over 90% after Peter Thiel takes stake and company discloses 82,186 ETH holdings

Ethereum digital asset treasury 180 Life Sciences Corp., which is rebranding to ETHZilla, saw its share price increase more than 90% on Tuesday following the announcement that tech billionaire Peter Thiel had become a shareholder.

According to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, through a handful of entities like The Founders Fund Growth Management, Thiel now owns a 7.5% stake in ETHZilla, the biotech firm that recently pivoted to a DAT business model.

Separately, the company disclosed Tuesday that it holds 82,186 ether, bought at an average acquisition price of $3,806.71, and valued at approximately $349 million. ETHZilla also holds approximately $238 million in USD cash equivalents.

ETHZilla's shares, ticker symbol ATNF, at one point traded as high as $6.33, compared to the previous day's close of $3.25, according to Yahoo Finance. ATNF's shares then receded from their high on Tuesday morning to $5.07 per share at 9:52 a.m. ET, a 52% gain.

Earlier this month, ETHZilla closed a $425 million private placement. The placement had over 60 participants, including Electric Capital, Polychain Capital, GSR, Konstantin Lomashuk (co-founder of Lido and p2p.org), and Sreeram Kannan (founder of Eigenlayer).

DATs for several different types of popular coins, notably Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana, have been cropping up in recent weeks as investors and token holders seek to turn smaller, publicly-traded firms into stockpilers of crypto akin to Michael Saylor's Strategy.

Also on Tuesday, BitMine filed with the SEC to expand its at-the-market equity program from $4.5 billion to $24.5 billion to help fund more ETH purchases for its Ethereum treasury.

"At ETHZilla we have put over $350 million in capital to work since the PIPE transaction we completed last week, and have executed on our strategy to rapidly build a differentiated Ethereum treasury vehicle," Executive Chairman McAndrew Rudisill stated in Tuesday's release. "Importantly, we believe that this reserve of ETH will unlock cash flow for our shareholders as we seek to deliver on our on-chain yield generation program through our external asset manager Electric Capital."