Author: Zz, ChainCatcher
Editor: TB, ChainCatcher
In July 2025, an SEC document ignited the crypto world: Peter Thiel's entity quietly acquired a 9.1% stake in BitMine Immersion Technologies, becoming the largest investor in this Ethereum vault. Upon the news, BitMine's stock price soared, reaching a high of 29.3% during trading.
The X platform was buzzing: Has PayPal's godfather finally set his sights on Ethereum? Is Peter Thiel shifting from Bitcoin? Is this a replication of MicroStrategy's strategy?
The market's excitement is not without reason. Just a year ago, Peter Thiel was publicly questioning Bitcoin: We already have ETFs, and who else would buy? With institutional investors already in, who can drive the next wave? From Bitcoin to heavily investing in Ethereum, what chess move is this Silicon Valley billionaire making?
Ambitions Beyond Holding $10 Billion in ETH
BitMine's ambition is unabashed: to become the Ethereum version of MicroStrategy. On July 14, 2025, BitMine held $500 million worth of Ethereum (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 crazy.
But Peter Thiel's interest goes far beyond another corporate vault. In 2023, a move by Founders Fund revealed his investment landscape: investing $200 million in Bitcoin and Ethereum, each taking half. This allocation itself is a signal that Ethereum has become equal to Bitcoin.
Besides this powerful punch with BitMine, Peter Thiel's layout in the Ethereum ecosystem has long been quietly unfolding:
Trading Infrastructure: In 2021, he invested in the Bullish exchange, with Peter Thiel personally serving as a senior advisor.
Compliance Infrastructure: In 2024, he invested in Paxos (a regulated stablecoin issuer), and in 2025 continued to double down by participating in Ubyx, aiming to become the Visa of the stablecoin domain.
DeFi Infrastructure: In June 2025, he led the investment in Avantis, specializing in on-chain derivatives.
Layer-2 Scaling: Invested in Caldera. When mainnet gas fees remain high, Layer-2 is key to making DeFi truly usable.
Bitcoin is digital gold, Ethereum is the new financial market. An investor close to Founders Fund revealed that buying Bitcoin is enough for storage. But to control future financial infrastructure, you need Ethereum.
This judgment is well-founded. While Bitcoin is still wrestling with storage vs. payment, Ethereum has already become: the main battlefield for DeFi (with over $100 billion in locked value), the preferred platform for stablecoins (USDT and USDC primarily circulate on Ethereum), and the base layer for RWA (real-world assets) tokenization.
More critically, Ethereum can generate interest. This is something Bitcoin cannot do. BitMine's Ethereum vault strategy is precisely targeting this, allowing assets to generate cash flow.
Peter Thiel's ambition goes beyond this: Bullish exchange secretly submitted an IPO (June 2025), supporting the creation of Erebor Bank specifically serving crypto enterprises (planned to hold stablecoins), and controlling 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 ecosystem in Founders Fund's blockchain investment portfolio is gradually increasing. If 2014-2022 was Peter Thiel's Bitcoin era, focused on value storage and ideological narrative, then from 2023 onwards, he has officially entered the Ethereum era, building actually usable financial infrastructure.
Bitcoin won the ideological war, but Ethereum will win practical application. When central bank digital currencies, corporate stablecoins, and tokenized securities become reality, they will all run on Ethereum.
Peter Thiel is dispersedly holding BitMine shares through various entities, not just investing, but preparing for control. When BitMine becomes the largest corporate Ethereum holder, Peter Thiel will effectively become the shadow central bank of the Ethereum ecosystem. From PayPal to Bitcoin, and now to Ethereum, Peter Thiel's financial empire dream has never changed, only the tools have been evolving.
Founders Fund, Led by Thiel, Started Accumulating When Bitcoin Was $1000
When Bitcoin was hovering around $1000, Founders Fund had already started accumulating. According to insiders, the first investment was over tens of millions of dollars, considered aggressive among institutional investors at the time.
But Peter Thiel's ambition was not limited to this. In 2013, he invested in Block.one (which later developed EOS). Although EOS ultimately failed to shake Ethereum, this investment exposed his true intent: he wanted not Bitcoin itself, but the next Bitcoin.
More intriguing is his layout path:
Mining End: Investing in BitMine in 2025 is just the latest move. As early as 2018, he participated in Layer1 financing.
Trading End: Before Bullish, he was an early investor in Kraken. Compared to Coinbase's compliance route, Kraken maintained a more crypto-punk style, which is very Peter Thiel.
Infrastructure: In 2021, when everyone was chasing DeFi tokens, Founders Fund quietly invested in Voltage, providing infrastructure for the Bitcoin Lightning Network.
Peter Thiel's understanding of Bitcoin goes far beyond digital gold. In April 2021, during a conversation with former Secretary of State Pompeo, he proposed that Bitcoin might be a financial weapon used by China to weaken the US dollar.
The crypto world was in an uproar. Supporters called him a traitor, opponents said he was conspiracy theorizing. However, placing this statement in Peter Thiel's overall thought system makes the logic clear: Bitcoin is not just an investment, but a geopolitical tool that can take the initiative in new financial wars.
Interestingly, just a year later, he changed his tone at a Bitcoin conference, describing it as a revolutionary weapon against financial old politics. He even listed 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 revolutionary freedom. What remains unchanged is the core objective: promoting a new order independent of the traditional financial system. This precisely demonstrates Peter Thiel's core characteristic: using narrative as a weapon.
His results are significant: selling out just before the Crypto Winter in 2022, earning 18 billion dollars; buying 1 hundred million dollars when Bitcoin dropped to 3 thousand dollars in 2023. A textbook-level high sell and low buy.
An intriguing detail: in 2024 July, when the Bitcoin ETF was launched and institutional funds entered massively, Peter Thiel publicly stated he was uncertain about significant price increases. The true weapon will never be an ETF that everyone can buy.
Behind All Strategies Lies an Unfinished Monetary Dream
Looking through the Founders Fund investment portfolio, the pattern is clear: almost no investment in DApps, no touch with GameFi, and only a superficial attempt with Non-Fungible Tokens. What truly interests him are: Layer2 expansion solutions (Caldera), compliant infrastructure (Paxos), derivative protocols (Avantis), stablecoin networks (Ubyx). Protocols over products, this is Peter Thiel's creed.
Going 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.
A decade before Bitcoin's birth, Peter Thiel was already thinking about how to disrupt the monetary system. Early PayPal even developed a PalmPilot application that could transfer digital cash via infrared. Eventually, due to regulatory pressure, they had to transform into a traditional payment company.
In 2002, eBay acquired PayPal for 15 billion dollars. After cashing out, Peter Thiel's first move was to establish Clarium Capital, systematically searching for the next monetary revolution opportunity. He waited for 12 years.
In 2014, when Peter Thiel first seriously studied Bitcoin, he saw not electronic cash, but PayPal's unfinished dream. We live in a world where bits are unregulated while atoms are regulated, he summarized in 2015. The underlying message is: in the digital world, you can construct anything, including an entirely new financial system.
In "From Zero to One", Peter Thiel repeatedly emphasized: competition is a loser's game, and monopoly brings excess profits. PayPal's experience taught him that establishing a financial monopoly in the traditional world is almost impossible. Regulations would strangle you, and big banks would surround you. Cryptocurrency changed the game rules.
How to establish a monopoly in a decentralized world? The answer is: control the most fundamental infrastructure. When everyone is building on Ethereum, owning Ethereum is like collecting rent. When all transactions require stablecoins, controlling stablecoin protocols is like printing money. When regulation finally arrives, owning compliance licenses is like holding an entry ticket.
Peter Thiel even funded key figures of this revolution. In 2014, his Peter Thiel Fellowship gave 19-year-old Vitalik Buterin one hundred thousand dollars, enabling him 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 in the people building the infrastructure.
This explains why Peter Thiel is simultaneously positioning in Erebor Bank (traditional license) and DeFi protocols (decentralized finance), ensuring he wins no matter which path the future takes. A deeper reason might be: in his view, cryptocurrency is not PayPal 2.0, but what PayPal was meant to be - a truly free, globally financial system not controlled by any government.
Now, Peter Thiel's Crypto Empire Has Taken Shape
In 2025, Peter Thiel is no longer satisfied being a passive token holder. Through BitMine, Bullish, and Erebor, he is constructing a complete crypto financial empire.
At this point, a question emerges: Why is Peter Thiel so aggressive when traditional financial giants are still hesitating? Perhaps the answer is hidden in his 2015 statement: We live in a world where bits are unregulated while atoms are regulated.
For Peter Thiel, cryptocurrency is not just a financial revolution, but the ultimate tool for building an unregulated bit world. Now is the time to place bets.
After all, as his friend and Tesla CEO Musk said: The best adventures are calculated adventures. In this ultimate cryptocurrency adventure, Peter Thiel's calculations have only just begun.
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