After selling a significant portion of its crypto holdings over the past few months, Ethereum-focused financial firm ETHZilla has now added jet engines to its balance sheet.
A Friday filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) shows that 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 hired Aero Engine Solutions to manage them in exchange for a monthly fee, according to the filing. The deal includes a buy-sell option agreement where either party can require the other to buy or sell the engines for $3 million each at the end of the lease, provided the engines remain in good working order.
While the move may sound strange, for an ETH tax company, buying jet engines and leasing them to aircraft operators is part of normal aerospace business outside of the crypto world.
Airline operators lease jet engines as spare parts to ensure that aircraft can continue to operate without interruption if their primary engine fails. Companies such as AerCap, Willis Lease Finance Corporation and SMBC Aero Engine Lease operate in this area.
The aviation business is also currently facing a major supply squeeze, with IATA saying its airline members would be forced to pay about $2.6 billion to lease additional spare engines by 2025. In fact, the global aircraft engine leasing market is expected to grow from $11.17 billion in 2025 to $15.56 billion in 2025. TechSci Research.
Tokenization pivot
The strange maneuver comes as government bonds of digital assets face growing pressure during the crypto markets’ decline in recent months.
Many public companies that aggressively raised funds to accumulate tokens last year are now trading well below the net asset value (NAV) of the crypto on their books, leaving little room to raise new capital.
ETHZilla itself previously sold $40 million in ETH in October to fund a share buyback program, then unloaded another $74.5 million in December to pay off outstanding debt. Meanwhile, the stock is down about 97% since its peak in August.
Still, the purchase of aircraft engines could be part of ETHZilla’s broader ambition to bring tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) on-chain.
In a December shareholder letter, the company outlined plans to tokenize assets in partnership with Liquidity.io, a regulated broker-dealer and SEC-registered alternative trading system (ATS). Before that, ETHZilla took a 15% stake in Zippy, a lender focused on manufactured home loans, with plans to tokenize those loans as compliant, marketable instruments. It also acquired a stake in car finance platform Karus with plans to bring loans on the chain.
“We are building a scalable tokenization pipeline across asset classes with predictable cash flows and global investor demand,” the firm said in a Wednesday X filing. The company expects to list the first tokenized asset offerings in the first quarter of the year.
