This Ethereum Treasury Stock Is Rising Following Beyond Meat Investor’s Backing

Shares in Ethereum treasury firm ETHZilla (ETHZ) jumped 14% on Monday and continued pumping after hours, furthering gains seen late last week amid news that a Beyond Meat (BYND) meme stock influencer has taken a position in the firm—and he’s pushing it to make changes.

Dimitri “Capybara Stocks” Semenikhin most recently helped push BYND to a more than 1,000% price spike last week, gaining comparisons to unofficial GameStop ambassador Keith “Roaring Kitty” Gill, who rallied Redditors behind the gaming retailer’s shares during the 2021 meme stock rally. 

With the BYND pump cooling off, Semenikhin has pivoted his focus. Now he sees value in ETHZilla, claiming to have purchased around 2.2% of the firm’s shares.

“Treasury bets are really measured by the multiplier they have on their net assets,” he told Decrypt on Monday. “ETHZilla’s multiplier at the time of my purchase was at an all-time low of 50%, and is even now well below other digital treasuries still, trading at 65-70% of its liquid/cash asset value.”

The investor, who further detailed his thesis to his growing audience of recent followers on X and YouTube, is now making a pitch to ETHZilla executives about its path forward. 

“Today, I’ve published an open letter to the company’s management, as I believe it has been greatly underutilizing its ability to buy back its shares as part of the already authorized share buyback program,” he said.

Semenikhin said it’s not normal that he was able to build such a large position of shares when the firm was trading at such a large discount to its net asset value. 

“The company should have bought back these shares themselves,” he added. 

In August, ETHZilla unveiled a $250 million share buyback program in a bid to provide value to its shareholders. Now one of its newer and most vocal investors is “urging” management to sell some of its ETH holdings to buy back shares, providing instant value to shareholders. 

Less than an hour after Semenikhin posted his open letter, ETHZilla announced it had sold Ethereum and repurchased around $40 million worth of shares and would continue to do so as its mNAV trades below 1.

“We are leveraging the strength of our balance sheet, including reducing our ETH holdings, to execute share repurchases,” said chairman and CEO McAndrew Rudisill, in a statement. 

The firm, which recently held 102,916 ETH, ranked sixth among publicly traded Ethereum treasury firms with a treasury valued around $434 million as of Monday ahead it its sale. It says it still holds around $400 million in ETH after its recent sale. 

Shares of ETHZ dipped as low as $12.78 last week, but rebounded to $20.65 at the close of trading on Monday and recently were trading at $23.00 after hours. As of the close of trading, ETHZ had jumped more than 20% over the last five trading days.

Last week, the firm completed a 1-for-10 reverse stock split to help boost the price of its shares and provide broader access to institutional investors. 

Beyond the newly famed meme stock investor, the firm also boasts billionaire Peter Thiel as a shareholder. Thiel and related entities purchased a 7.5% stake in ETHZilla in August, leading to an earlier stock spike. 

“After the success of my Beyond Meat investment and given the large community that this has created, I wanted to showcase to this newly formed community that there are also more risk-averse investments that can be made with asymmetric upside at the same time to showcase values around responsible and opportunistic investments,” said Semenikhin. 

Additional reporting by Ryan Gladwin