Originally published by Decrypt on November 10, 2026, at 01:08 UTC+8.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies added 9,587 ETH worth roughly $20 million, extending its weekly Ethereum buying streak as chairman Tom Lee used comments from Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin to defend the company’s treasury strategy.
The NYSE-listed company said Monday that it held 6,070,092 ETH, valued at approximately $13.6 billion using a reference price of $2,234 per coin. That represented 4.97% of Ethereum’s 122.2 million-token supply.
By Bitmine’s calculation, it was 99% of the way toward its goal of owning 5% of the supply—a target it calls the “Alchemy of 5%.” The company said it had reached that level of progress in just 15 months. It has purchased Ethereum every week since launching its treasury strategy on June 30, 2025.
Why Buterin’s comments matter to Lee
At the Devcon conference in Mumbai, Buterin said: “I’ve finally made up my mind, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money.”
Lee called the declaration “a seismic shift,” arguing that it clarified how ETH could capture value during what he described as a coming “supercycle of tokenization and AI.” He characterized ETH as “pristine and trusted collateral,” rather than a cash-flow token, and described Ethereum as the layer-1 network favored by financial institutions moving assets onchain.
Buterin’s explanation was more specific: in an X post, he said he now viewed ETH primarily as a store of value, in part because fee-burning was weaker than it had once appeared and optimizing for it could conflict with decentralization. Lee presented that reasoning as consistent with Ethereum’s roadmap and the tokenization trend.
The distinction: Buterin’s comments concerned ETH’s monetary role. The argument that they validate Bitmine’s accumulation strategy—and the broader tokenization and AI thesis—was Lee’s interpretation.
Disclosure: Decrypt reported that Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, its parent company.
Holdings and staking: reported figures versus projections
As of November 8, Bitmine reported total holdings of $14.3 billion, including its Ethereum, cash, other tokens and investments it describes as “moonshots.” Those holdings included:
- 216 Bitcoin.
- $475 million in cash and marketable securities.
- A $180 million stake in Beast Industries.
- A $75 million position in Eightco Holdings, which Bitmine describes as a rare publicly traded route to indirect OpenAI exposure.
Decrypt reported that Bitmine remained the world’s largest Ethereum treasury and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy. Bitmine’s release put Strategy’s Bitcoin holdings at approximately 849,327 BTC.
Bitmine also reported staking 5,227,037 ETH, roughly 86% of its Ethereum holdings, through its MAVAN platform. Its approximately $359 million in annualized staking revenue was a projection, not a reported realized result.
Separately, the company had recently argued that the muted market response to what the source described as a record Binance hack demonstrated growing crypto-market resilience. That was Bitmine’s assessment, rather than an independently established conclusion.