ETHZilla: Ethereum Treasury Strategy | McAndrew Rudisill & Avichal Garg

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Tech News, News, Technology

4.8 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 27 August 2025

⏱️ 91 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

ETHZilla wants to turn ETH into Wall Street’s new reserve asset, and they’ve built a plan to do it. Ryan sits down with Avichal Garg (Electric Capital) and Mac Rudisill (ETHZilla) to unpack why ETH treasuries exploded this cycle, how credit markets (converts, preferreds, and debt) supercharge accumulation, and why stablecoins → DeFi → ETH forms a flywheel that turns Ether into high-quality collateral. We dig into leverage discipline, mNAV premiums, operational security, and the business math that makes an ETH treasury look more like Berkshire than a hype trade. Plus: can this wave trigger a DeFi after-boom, and what does “winning” actually mean for ETHZilla? --- 📣RONIN “ONCHAIN NINTENDO” | DOWNLOAD THE RONIN WALLET https://bankless.cc/RoninWallet --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🪙FRAX | SELF SUFFICIENT DeFi https://bankless.cc/Frax 🦄UNISWAP | SWAP ON UNICHAIN https://bankless.cc/unichain 🛞MANTLE | MODULAR LAYER 2 NETWORK https://bankless.cc/Mantle --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Intro 3:53 Catching Tom Lee and Peter Thiel Backing 7:53 Treasury vs. ETF vs. Just Holding ETH 11:58 Why Treasuries Are Booming 16:51 New Debt Instruments & Appetite 22:00 Leverage, Rehypothecation & Risk Controls 29:50 The Big Unlock: ETH as High-Quality Collateral 34:35 Stablecoins → DeFi → ETH Flywheel 38:55 “ETH Is the Next Bitcoin?” 54:51 Why ETH Lagged BTC 56:05 ETH vs BTC Treasuries: Yield Surface 1:01:33 Why Electric Capital Runs Deployment 1:03:45 Buy Rules: Time vs. Price 1:09:00 Attention Matters: Spokesperson & Community 1:13:24 What “Winning” Looks Like for ETHZilla 1:17:59 Where Are We in the Cycle? 1:26:12 DeFi Afterboom? --- RESOURCES Maria Shen’s “Beyond Stablecoins” Report https://x.com/MariaShen/status/1942658782439395815 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Transcript

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0:00.0	Like, why wasn't this possible 10 years ago?
0:01.5	The credit guys, the debt markets are now willing to consider Bitcoin and ETH as collateral. And that was a thing that you didn't have five years ago. Like, you just didn't consider this worthy collateral. But now that, like, the ETH markets have gotten deep enough, all these convert guys are like, look, my mandate, the reason my LPs as a debt guy give me money is to go generate yield and find these kinds of opportunities.
0:24.4	Here's a new form of collateral to the tune of, you know, in the Bitcoin case,
0:26.8	$2 trillion in the case of ETH, $500 billion.
0:29.9	These are now sufficiently large types of collateral.
0:31.4	The SEC is cool with these now.
0:32.0	They're ETS.
0:36.6	So I'm now willing to consider this as a new form of collateral against which I can lend.
0:44.1	Welcome to bankless. This is Ryan Sean Adams. It's just me today. David's out. So I'm here to help you become more bankless. We have ETHZilla on the podcast. This is Ethereum's monster
0:50.9	treasury company. All right. This is a new ETH Treasury Company that's launched.
0:56.2	I guess this is the fifth episode in our ETH Treasury Company series for those keeping track.
1:01.9	We got Tom Leon, Joe Lubin, Andrew Keyes, Sam Tabar. Each of these conversations had a unique
1:08.2	vantage point. I think you really have to listen to them all in order to get a
1:12.1	sense of what's going on in this ETH treasury meta and what the future is for ETH or the asset.
1:18.5	I asked many of the same questions I asked a previous guess and many new ones as well. Some of the
1:23.8	common questions like why ETH, why a treasury vehicle, what's the bull case for ETH?
1:28.7	What I found is the one thing they've had in common is they all view ETH as an institutional
1:34.2	grade asset, the same type of asset that Bitcoin has emerged into.
1:38.9	Also, this is a multi-year macro trade for each of these treasury companies.
1:43.9	The guest today used the term
1:45.5	store of value to describe ether, a store of value, of course, with massive upside, some comps to
1:51.8	gold and other crypto assets, as you'll hear. One on luck for me in this episode was the depth we got
	...

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