Earlier this month Bitcoin treasury company ZOOZ Strategy (Nasdaq: ZOOZ; TASE: ZOOZ) CEO Jordan Fried visited Israel for meetings with investors. Since the Israeli company changed its field of activity last summer – from kinetic energy to investing in Bitcoin – ZOOZ’s stock has lost 84% and is trading at a market cap of $87 million, which is even lower than the value of the Bitcoin it holds, purchased at an average price higher than its current price.
However, it is difficult to miss Fried’s great optimism, both on Bitcoin and ZOOZ’s strategy. “The volatility in the price of Bitcoin is a feature, not a bug,” he tells “Globes.” “Every investment channel that institutional investors start to adopt initially suffers from volatility. When I started investing in Bitcoin in 2013, they told me I was crazy; I was the ‘black sheep’ of the family, they told me not to talk about it on Seder night,” he laughs. “Today, BlackRock and Fidelity are issuing ETFs (exchange-traded funds) on Bitcoin, and teachers’ and firefighters’ pension funds are invested directly in Bitcoin.”
In general, Fried sees Bitcoin as one of the most important inventions in human history: “People can send money to the other side of the world without any middlemen in between,” he enthuses. “Bitcoin broke the monopoly of a state currency, and we’re starting to see countries adopting it as legal tender.”
ZOOZ Strategy, formerly ZOOZ Power, held its IPO on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) in 2021 as a company developing kinetic energy storage technology, and was later merged with a SPAC in the US but struggled on Wall Street. Last summer, after the stock plunged, Zooz began exploring strategic options, and the process culminated in the decision to raise funding and become a Bitcoin treasury company. Treasury companies focus on purchasing and holding digital assets, mainly cryptocurrencies, and in the past year the number of these companies has increased and has been a prominent trend on Wall Street. The companies provide investors with exposure to cryptocurrencies.
Following his grandfather: “A love story with the State of Israel”
As part of the move, Fried was appointed CEO, after having founded and managed blockchain ventures, and even before that, he had produced an exit from a cybersecurity startup he had founded. His employment agreement includes an annual salary of $1, along with blocked shares, some of which will mature subject to an increase in the share price.
Until about two years ago, Fried had neither dreamed nor planned to run a public company in Tel Aviv, but October 7 led to a major change for him. “My story with the State of Israel is a love story,” says Fried. He recounts that his grandfather, Yossi Dagan, immigrated to Israel from Germany in 1933, joined the Irgun as a teenager, and fought in the War of Independence. Although he left Israel, his grandfather returned to help whenever war broke out: “He always left everything and was willing to risk his life. On October 7, I knew that if he were still alive, he would have gotten on the plane. I did it in his place.”
That same day, Fried received a call from a friend asking for help chartering a plane for reservists who were stranded in Los Angeles and wanted to get to Israel. He flew to Los Angeles and decided to join the flight to Israel, “even though I only had jeans and a T-shirt on, and my passport.” During a refueling stop in Europe, he was interviewed by US TV channels, “and I cried like a baby. ‘Crazy’ people are coming home to war. That’s my grandfather’s legacy.”
Fried later worked as part of the Israel Friends of the IDF, which raised tens of millions of dollars and helped – from purchasing equipment for soldiers, to meals, to treating soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder. “It was amazing, but then I came to the conclusion that I was 36 years old and still didn’t want to be a full-time philanthropist,” he says. That’s how he began looking at business initiatives in Israel. “I’m lucky – I sold a software company at the age of 26, I was in the right place at the right time. I thought about how I could help, not just with kindness.”
Until regulatory approval, just buy the share
Among other things, Fried has founded a company that brings foreign workers to Israel from Asian countries, and invested in private companies that he is willing to disclose are mainly in the fields of defense-tech and energy. “All of this is over the last 24 months. Suddenly I looked and said, ‘Wow, you can make a lot of money in Israel.’ There are a lot of serial entrepreneurs here, and that’s how Silicon Valley was built. I also really like the capital market in Israel.” In the future, he hopes to immigrate to Israel: “Before, I would come here as a tourist, today I am welcomed like a brother. This is home.”
What is ZOOZ’s relative advantage over other investment firms that invest in Bitcoin?
“The advantage stems from the fact that, unfortunately, Israelis have regulatory difficulties buying Bitcoin and bringing it to a bank account in Israel. It’s not impossible – I tried it myself, but Israeli banks will hold the money for 30-90 days until they approve it, and I don’t blame them because that’s how US banks were until a few years ago. Our solution says: don’t buy Bitcoin, wait for Israeli banks to fill the gaps. You can get exposure to Bitcoin through Zooz stock, and you don’t even have to convert shekels to dollars. We think every Israeli company should think about transferring part of its balance sheet to Bitcoin.”
ZOOZ recently published a strategy that includes several components, including: optimizing traditional operations and reducing costs; improving transparency; and generating returns and strategic expansion. Fried explains, “When you think about Bitcoin, you usually don’t look at the entire financial services economy around it. You can borrow and lend and profit from it. There are strong players who could, for example, who could borrow from ZOOZ. We are looking at this and want to be more active in managing the asset, not just holding it.”
On the company’s original energy activity, he says that several options are being considered: “We have reduced expenses in the area. In the past, under the previous management, the direction was towards the electric vehicle market and that was good when the batteries were expensive, but the price has come down. We think that we can perhaps direct the activity towards the hyper-scalers (large cloud providers such as Amazon and Microsoft).” Fried also does not rule out the possibility of spinning off the activity into a separate company.
Undervaluation in the market and a warning from Nasdaq
How do you explain the discount at which ZOOZ is trading compared with its Bitcoin holdings?
“The market is undervaluing ZOOZ, and that’s without taking into account the cash reserves. This week I started meeting with investors from Israel and telling them ZOOZ’s story, and the reactions were very positive.”
In the meantime, ZOOZ’s stock has fallen below $1 and received a warning from Nasdaq for non-compliance with trading rules. A possible technical solution to this is to carry out a reverse split that would merge every few shares into one share. At the same time, Zooz also has an approved plan to buy back up to $50 million in shares.
In a broader perspective, Fried believes that Bitcoin is part of a country’s national security. He believes that the currency should be viewed in the context of the energy required to produce it, along with needs such as computing, broadband and storage capabilities. In Israel, Bitcoin is not mined on a significant scale because the cost of energy is high.
“What worries me from a geopolitical perspective, also in the US but especially with regard to Israel, is that they are behind on the energy issue,” Fried emphasizes. “China has over 20 nuclear reactors, the US has two, and Israel has none at all. If there were, the cost of energy would not be so high and there would be more data centers here (which are required for AI projects), and we need AI to win on a global level. We must push for the creation of new and cheaper energy, and I talked about it with Israeli officials. It is still possible to close the gap.”
Published by Globes, Israel business news – en.globes.co.il – on January 28, 2026.
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd., 2026.
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