Bitmine Immersion Technologies added 9,587 ETH worth roughly $20 million, extending its weekly Ethereum purchases as chairman Tom Lee cited Vitalik Buterin’s description of ETH as money to support the company’s treasury strategy.
Original reporting date: November 10, 2026, at 01:08:21 UTC+8. The figures and statements below reflect that reporting period.
An accumulation strategy approaching its target
The NYSE-listed company said Monday that it held 6,070,092 ETH, valued at roughly $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 own calculation, it was 99% of the way toward its goal of owning 5% of the network—a target it calls the “Alchemy of 5%”—after just 15 months. The company said it had purchased Ethereum every week since launching its treasury strategy on June 30, 2025.
The narrative: ETH as money, not a cash-flow token
Lee pointed to comments by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at Devcon in Mumbai: “I’ve finally made up my mind, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money.”
Calling the declaration “a seismic shift,” Lee argued that it clarified ETH’s role in what he described as a coming “supercycle of tokenization and AI.” His thesis treats ETH as “pristine and trusted collateral,” rather than a cash-flow token, and rests on his characterization of Ethereum as the layer-1 network favored by financial institutions bringing assets onchain.
Buterin’s reasoning was more specifically about ETH’s monetary role. In an X post, he said he now viewed ETH primarily as a store of value, including because fee-burning appeared weaker than he had previously thought and optimizing for it could conflict with decentralization. Lee interpreted that reasoning as consistent with Ethereum’s roadmap and a broader tokenization wave.
These are distinct claims: Buterin’s assessment concerns how ETH derives value, while Lee uses that assessment to support Bitmine’s accumulation strategy. The purchases and treasury balances document Bitmine’s exposure; they do not, by themselves, establish the anticipated tokenization-and-AI supercycle.
Treasury size and staking exposure
As of November 8, Bitmine reported total holdings of $14.3 billion across crypto, cash and what it calls “moonshot” investments. Alongside its ETH, 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 proxy for indirect OpenAI exposure.
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 holdings at about 849,327 BTC.
The company had 5,227,037 ETH—roughly 86% of its Ethereum holdings—staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized staking revenue of about $359 million. That revenue figure was a projection, not a reported realized result.
Separately, Bitmine had recently argued that the muted market response to the record Binance hack demonstrated crypto’s growing resilience. That was the company’s interpretation of the market reaction.
Source disclosure: Decrypt stated that Tom Lee is one of several investors in its parent company, Dastan.
