Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 101,627 ether last week — its largest weekly purchase of 2026 — bringing its total holdings to 4.97 million ETH and within striking distance of its stated goal of controlling 5 per cent of Ethereum's circulating supply.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 101,627 ether last week — its largest weekly purchase of 2026 — bringing its total holdings to 4.97 million ETH and within striking distance of its stated goal of controlling 5 per cent of Ethereum's circulating supply.
The purchase, worth roughly $230 million at current prices, was funded from excess capital generated by the company's bitcoin mining operations. Bitmine disclosed the figures in its weekly holdings update, posted on X alongside a letter from chairman Tom Lee.
The numbers are striking. Bitmine now controls 4.12 per cent of Ethereum's 120.7 million token supply — 82 per cent of the way toward what Lee calls the "Alchemy of 5%" target. At current accumulation rates, the company could reach that threshold within two months. No other entity, corporate or otherwise, holds anywhere close to this concentration of a single proof-of-stake network's native token.
Lee framed the buying spree in geopolitical terms. "ETH has outperformed the S&P 500 by 2,280 basis points since the war started and remains the single best performing asset," he wrote, referring to the US–Iran conflict that has weighed on equity markets since early 2026. It is a bold claim — crude oil has posted similar gains over the same period — but ether's 41 per cent rally from its February lows does lend it some credibility. Lee described ETH as a "wartime store of value," a phrase that would have sounded absurd two years ago but reflects how the asset has behaved during a period when traditional safe havens disappointed.
The staking operation underpinning Bitmine's thesis is substantial. The company has staked 3.33 million of its 4.97 million ETH — roughly two-thirds of the total — generating $221 million in annualised revenue at a 2.88 per cent seven-day yield. At full staking capacity, Bitmine projects annual rewards of $330 million. That income stream gives the treasury strategy a cash-flow dimension that Strategy's bitcoin-only approach lacks; bitcoin, unlike ether, pays no native yield.
Bitmine's total asset position now stands at $12.9 billion, comprising $11.46 billion in ether, $1.12 billion in cash, a $200 million stake in Beast Industries, and $107 million in Eightco Holdings (NASDAQ: ORBS). The company uplisted to the New York Stock Exchange on 9 April — a move that immediately boosted daily trading volume to $1.2 billion on a five-day average, making BMNR the 80th most-traded US stock.
Ethereum processed 200 million transactions in Q1, its busiest quarter on record, yet the price has struggled to sustain momentum above $2,400. Bitmine's aggressive accumulation is happening at a moment when many institutional investors remain sceptical of ether's investment case; the token is still 52 per cent below its all-time high despite the network's growing dominance in tokenised real-world assets and decentralised finance.
The comparison with Strategy is impossible to avoid. Both companies have made a single cryptocurrency the centrepiece of their corporate identity, funded their purchases through capital markets, and attracted a devoted retail following that treats the stock as a leveraged bet on the underlying asset. But where Strategy is break-even on $61.56 billion in bitcoin acquired over five years, Bitmine has built its $11.46 billion ether position in barely six months — a pace that makes Saylor's accumulation look measured by comparison.
Whether concentrating nearly 5 per cent of a major blockchain's supply in a single corporate treasury is visionary or reckless will depend on ether's performance over the coming years. For now, Bitmine's staking income provides a margin of safety that pure buy-and-hold strategies do not. The company's next weekly disclosure is due on 27 April; at this pace, the 5 per cent threshold could be reached before the end of May.
