After selling a significant portion of its cryptocurrency reserve in recent months, Ethereum-focused treasury firm ETHZilla has now added jet engines to its balance sheet.
A Friday filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows the company purchased two CFM56-7B24 aircraft engines for $12.2 million through a newly formed subsidiary, ETHZilla Aerospace LLC.
The engines are currently leased to a major airline and ETHZilla has hired Aero Engine Solutions to manage them for a monthly fee, according to the document. The agreement includes a buy-sell option agreement in which either party can require the other to buy or sell the engines for $3 million each at the expiration of the lease, provided the engines remain in suitable condition.
While the move may seem strange, for an ETH treasury company, purchasing jet engines and leasing them to aircraft operators is part of normal aerospace business outside of the cryptocurrency world.
Airline operators rent jet engines as spare parts to ensure planes can continue operating without interruption if their main engine fails. Companies such as AerCap, Willis Lease Finance Corporation and SMBC Aero Engine Lease operate in this space.
The aerospace business is also currently facing a major engine supply shortage, with IATA saying its member airlines would be forced to pay around $2.6 billion to lease additional spare engines in 2025. In fact, the global aircraft engine leasing market is expected to grow from $11.17 billion in 2025 to $15.56 billion in 2031 at a CAGR. 5.68%, according to TechSci Research.
Tokenization pivot
The strange move comes as digital asset hoards face growing pressure amid the decline in crypto markets in recent months.
Many public companies that aggressively raised funds to accumulate tokens last year are now trading well below the cryptocurrency’s net asset value (NAV) on their books, leaving little room to raise fresh capital.
ETHZilla itself previously sold $40 million worth of ETH in October to fund a share buyback program, and then offloaded another $74.5 million in December to redeem outstanding debt. Meanwhile, its shares have fallen about 97% from their August peak.
Still, purchasing aircraft engines could be part of ETHZilla’s broader ambition to bring tokenized real-world assets (RWA) to the chain.
In a letter to shareholders in December, the company outlined its plans to tokenize assets in partnership with Liquidity.io, a regulated broker-dealer and SEC-registered alternative trading system (ATS). Prior to that, ETHZilla acquired a 15% stake in Zippy, a lender focused on manufactured home loans, with plans to tokenize those loans as tradable and compliant instruments. It also acquired a stake in car financing platform Karus with plans to add lending to the chain.
“We are building a scalable tokenization pipeline across asset classes with predictable cash flows and demand from global investors,” the company said in a Wednesday X post. The company expects to list the first offerings of tokenized assets in the first quarter of the year.
