Peter Thiel, president and founder of Clarium Capital Management LLC, holds hundred dollars bills as he speaks during the Bitcoin 2022 conference in Miami, Florida, U.S., on Thursday, April 7, 2022.
Eva Marie Uzcategui | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Shares of the ether treasury company Bitmine Immersion Technologies surged Wednesday after tech billionaire Peter Thiel disclosed a 9% stake in the firm through his venture capital firm Founders Fund.
The stock rallied more than 19%. Companies with a similar focus rose in tandem. SharpLink Gaming, which has also initiated an ETH treasury strategy and whose board is chaired by Ethereum cofounder Joe Lubin, jumped about 15%. Bit Digital, which last month exited bitcoin mining to focus on its ETH treasury and staking plans, gained 9%.
Bitmine, a bitcoin mining company, recently initiated a buying strategy around ether and appointed market strategist Tom Lee of Fundstrat as chairman of its board to help make it the MicroStrategy of ether.
The latest wave of interest in ETH-related assets follows an announcement by Robinhood that it will enable trading of tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs across Europe, after a groundswell of interest in stablecoins throughout June following Circle’s IPO and renewed optimism that the Senate’s proposed stablecoin bill, the GENIUS Act, could advance through the House this week.
The price of ether itself also continued its rally, up more than 4% Wednesday. The coin has doubled in price in the past three months.
Thiel is a venture capitalist and hedge fund manager best known as a cofounder of both PayPal and Palantir and an early investor in Facebook. Founders Fund was an investor in Tagomi, the crypto brokerage acquired by Coinbase in 2020, and Polymarket, the prediction market built on Ethereum.
