Bitmine Immersion Technologies disclosed on May 4 that it acquired 101,745 ether last week, taking its treasury to 5.18 million ETH and pushing total holdings to $13.1 billion. Chairman Tom Lee used the announcement to declare that crypto spring had commenced.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies announced on Monday that it bought 101,745 ether last week for roughly $238 million, taking its total ether treasury to 5.18 million ETH and the firm's combined holdings, including crypto, cash and "moonshots," to $13.1 billion. The company is now the second-largest publicly traded crypto treasury after Strategy and the largest Ethereum-specific one in the world.
The number that matters most is 5,180,131 ETH. That is approximately 4.29% of total ether supply. Bitmine has a target it calls the "Alchemy of 5%," meaning ownership of that share of ether outright, and it is now 86% of the way there. The company started this campaign in late June 2025, when it pivoted from a small Bitcoin mining operation into a designated Ethereum treasury. Ten months in, it owns more ether than any other listed company.
Chairman Tom Lee did not let the disclosure pass without commentary. "Crypto Spring, in our view, has commenced and like past cycles, investor sentiment and conviction are muted and bearish even as crypto prices strengthen," he said in the release. The framing is the same one he has been workshopping since April: that ether benefits from two long-running trends, the migration of financial assets onto blockchain rails and the rise of AI agents that prefer neutral public networks for payments and verification. Both, in his view, run on Ethereum.
Bitmine's staking operation has scaled with the treasury. Roughly 4.36 million of its 5.18 million ETH, or about 84%, is staked, generating annualised revenue of $297 million. That is a real cash flow on a balance-sheet asset, not a paper mark, and it puts Bitmine in a different category from companies that simply hold a token on the assumption it goes up. The yield underpins the thesis. Without it, the maths against Strategy's bitcoin-only stack does not work.
Strategy still owns the most valuable crypto treasury in public markets. Michael Saylor's company holds 818,334 BTC after its 3,273-bitcoin purchase last week, worth roughly $64.2 billion at current prices. Bitmine's $13.1 billion total is a fraction of that, but the gap closes when you adjust for the fact that Strategy carries no native yield on its position and Bitmine's ETH is generating staking revenue equivalent to a small mid-cap dividend stock.
The 101,745-ETH purchase landed during a specific stretch of the market. Ether climbed back to $2,400 over the past week as ETF flows turned positive again, and large buyers — wallets that on-chain analysts classify as institutional — accumulated more than 140,000 ETH in 96 hours. Bitmine is in that cohort. It is also one of the largest single buyers of ether in any week since the asset's 2021 peak.
Lee's "crypto spring" phrasing is a deliberate echo. Crypto winter, the term that defined 2022 and most of 2023, was used by every fund manager who needed a frame for sustained drawdowns. Spring is its mirror image: the period when prices recover but sentiment hasn't caught up. By using it now, with bitcoin at $79,000 and ether near $2,400, Lee is staking out a public position that the cycle has turned. He has been wrong on similar calls before; he was right on the early 2024 bottom.
There is a second number that explains the pivot. Bitmine moved to ether in mid-2025 partly because the company's mining hardware, like that of most US miners, was struggling against rising network difficulty and high power prices. Pivoting from mining to a treasury strategy let the company use the same balance-sheet capital differently — borrow, raise equity, or rotate hashrate proceeds into ETH and earn the staking yield. The strategy looks vindicated when ether is up. It looked dangerous in February, when ether traded below $1,800. The company kept buying.
The ETH treasury cohort has thinned. Several smaller imitators wound down or rotated to bitcoin in Q1 after the price drawdown chewed through their cost bases. Bitmine's scale gave it the cushion to keep accumulating. Total holdings, including 200 bitcoin and a small slate of "moonshot" early-stage positions, passed $13.1 billion on a day when ether closed lower, which is why the headline number slipped slightly from earlier intraday estimates. Ether ETF flows did not help either. Spot ether ETFs took $82.47 million in net outflows for the week ending May 1, the first negative week since early April, even as Bitcoin's April ETF haul reached $1.97 billion.
Coinbase Q1 earnings drop on Wednesday. The Senate Banking Committee may mark up the CLARITY Act before Memorial Day. Bitmine's next disclosure, by company practice, lands a week from Monday.
