Key Takeaways:
Bitmine bought 26,497 ETH on Aug. 9, lifting its treasury to 5.42 million coins worth $10.7 billion as it pushes toward 5 percent of Ethereum supply.
Tom Lee, chairman of Bitmine, said the company is maintaining a high pace of purchases because Ethereum's recent weakness does not reflect improving fundamentals.
The company's holdings now represent 4.66 percent of Ethereum's total supply of 120.7 million coins, bringing Bitmine 93 percent of the way toward its stated goal. During the past week alone, Bitmine added 76,881 ETH. The company also disclosed that 4.72 million ETH, worth around $8.1 billion, is currently staked, generating projected annualized staking revenues of roughly $226 million.
The accumulation comes as Bitmine closed a public offering of 3.5 million shares of its 9.50 percent Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock, raising over $273 million in net proceeds. The preferred shares are expected to begin trading on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker "BMNP" on Tuesday. Tom Lee said he expects to reach the 5 percent ownership target sometime in 2026.
ETH rallied over 10 percent in the past 24 hours, with retail sentiment on Stocktwits turning bullish from bearish while chatter stayed at low levels. BMNR's stock was up over 5 percent during mid-day trading, though retail sentiment around the stock remained bearish.
The company's aggressive accumulation strategy has drawn attention from market participants. Bankless co-founder David Hoffman highlighted that ETH had traded below its 200-week simple moving average for the first time in its history before recovering, and questioned where the next wave of buying would come from. "Where will the next $18 billion of buying come from?" Hoffman wrote on X, adding that he was "unsure."
Despite that skepticism, Bitmine remains bullish on Ethereum's long-term outlook. Lee argued that Ethereum continues to benefit from Wall Street's growing push to tokenize real-world assets on public blockchains and the increasing use of blockchain infrastructure by agentic AI systems.
Bitmine's ETH treasury remains the largest in the world, trailing only Strategy's Bitcoin treasury among publicly disclosed crypto corporate holdings. The company also highlighted the expansion of MAVAN, its institutional Ethereum staking platform, which currently supports a portion of the treasury and is intended to serve external institutional clients over time.
The move toward controlling 5 percent of total supply could raise concentration risk concerns among market participants, as a single entity would hold a significant share of the second-largest cryptocurrency. The disclosure comes as a growing debate unfolds over whether corporate treasury companies can become a durable source of demand for Ethereum.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
