Bitmine Immersion Technologies is 99% of the way to owning one in every 20 Ethereum tokens in existence. And its chairman says the buying spree is almost over.
The company said Monday that it bought 12,532 ETH over the past week. At the $2,544 per-token price Bitmine uses to value its holdings, that’s about $31.9 million, and it brings the total stash to 6,028,946 ETH.
That pile equals 4.9% of Ethereum’s total supply of 122.1 million tokens. Bitmine’s stated goal is 5%, a target the company calls the “Alchemy of 5%.”
The finish line is about 100,000 tokens away
Chairman Tom Lee has been clear that the purchases have an end date. In his monthly Chairman’s message last week, Lee said Bitmine needs “about 100,000 more ETH, and that’s about it.” He has said the firm’s Ethereum buying will stop once it reaches its target.
At the pace of the last two weeks, that’s not far off. This week’s $31.9 million buy followed a $41 million purchase the week before.
Lee is pitching the slowdown as a feature. “Now we’re done stacking while a bull market is starting,” Lee said in the video. “So if we’re done stacking, but ETH goes up a lot, you can imagine that we’ll outperform Ethereum.”
A bull market forecast with a lot riding on it
Lee predicted the coming crypto run would be “the biggest bull market we’ve ever seen.” He pointed to four drivers: tokenization, a wealth transfer to younger investors, supply soaked up by digital asset treasury firms like his own and AI agents using crypto wallets.
He also said Bitmine shares, then trading around $26, are 90% correlated with ETH. His projection: ETH at $22,000 would put the stock somewhere between $300 and $500.
That’s a forecast from the chairman of a company whose balance sheet is mostly Ethereum. Weigh it accordingly.
Lee isn’t shy about the buying record either. In a press release, he said the firm’s “track record of consistent buying of crypto is unmatched by any public company in the world.”
What’s on the balance sheet beyond ETH
Bitmine put its total crypto, cash and investment holdings at $16.2 billion. Besides the Ethereum, that figure covers 214 BTC, $612 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and an $85 million stake in Eightco Holdings.
Most of the ETH isn’t sitting idle. The firm has staked 5,067,309 ETH, which Lee said generates annualized staking revenue of about $336 million.
Then there’s BMNP, Bitmine’s 9.5% perpetual preferred stock, which Lee also highlighted. It was issued at $80 in June and last closed at $99.53, according to the release. If you bought at issue, that’s the one part of this story where the gain is already on the books and doesn’t depend on ETH hitting $22,000.
