Tom Lee’s BitMine Makes Biggest Ethereum Buy Yet in 2026

Publicly traded Ethereum Treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies added 111,942 ETH, or a value of more than $237 million, to its balance sheet last week, marking the company’s largest purchase so far this year in terms of ETH.

The purchase brings the company’s total holdings to 5,390,404 ETH worth approximately $11.4 billion, with Ethereum trading around $2,117 on Tuesday morning.

BitMine now owns more than 4.4% of the circulating supply of ETH tokens, more than 88% of the way toward its goal of reaching 5% — a feat it expects to achieve “sometime in 2026,” according to chairman Tom Lee.

(Disclaimer: Tom Lee is an investor in Decode parent company Dastan).

Lee recently telegraphed that to the company would slow Ethereum’s purchasing rate as it did not want to reach the 5% mark too quickly. However, with ETH trading below $2,200, BitMine’s frontman said last week that the company considered this an “attractive opportunity” to strengthen his position.

“We continue to expect a super cycle for crypto and Ethereum, driven by the twin drivers of Wall Street tokenization and agentic AI. And so we continue to steadily acquire ETH, with BitMine now owning nearly 5.4 million ETH tokens,” he said in a statement.

Of the company’s 5.39 million ETH, more than 4.7 million ETH (or nearly $10 billion worth) is staked through its industrial staking platform, the Made in America Validator Network (MAVAN). Based on current staking numbers, BitMine expects annual staking revenues of more than $276 million.

Shares of BitMine (BMNR) are up about 3.3% since the opening bell, recently changing hands at $19.51. At that point, shares are down nearly 12% in the past month and more than 38% in the past six months of trading.

But the company expects a liquidity injection next month is added to the Russell 1000 indexan index that tracks the 1,000 largest companies in the United States. Before the shot, Lee hinted that passive index funds and ETFs could do the same creating a wave of automated demand.

The company’s Treasury bill, Ethereum, is down 2% in the past 24 hours and is trading around $2,078. The second-largest crypto asset by market cap is down more than 11% in the past month and remains about 58% below its all-time high in August of $4,946.