Tom Lee's BitMine Immersion Technologies added 9,926 ETH worth roughly $19 million last week, bringing its total Ethereum holdings to 5.82 million tokens. The purchase keeps the company on pace toward the target it set when it began buying ETH on a weekly basis 14 months ago: owning 5% of Ethereum's entire circulating supply.
At current levels, BitMine's stash represents 4.8% of ETH's 120.7 million circulating supply, putting the firm, in chairman Tom Lee's words, '96% of the way' to what the company calls its 'Alchemy of 5%' goal. As of August 16 at 9:30pm ET, BitMine's full crypto and cash position included 5,815,164 ETH valued at $1,893 per token, 210 BTC, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries, a $73 million stake in Eightco Holdings, and $78 million in cash and marketable securities.
A Slower Pace of Accumulation
The latest purchase continues BitMine's buying streak, but at a noticeably smaller scale than earlier in the year, when weekly additions regularly ran into the tens of thousands of tokens. Part of the shift reflects a broader reallocation of capital: the company has increasingly directed proceeds toward share buybacks rather than exclusively expanding its ETH position, a change in emphasis that suggests BitMine is now managing its balance sheet as much for shareholder returns as for pure accumulation as it closes in on its supply target.
Related: JPMorgan's Tokenized Fund Push on Ethereum Tops $900 Million
Part of a Broader Institutional ETH Push
BitMine's accumulation sits alongside other large-scale institutional bets on Ethereum this year, including bank-led tokenized fund products on the network that have separately pushed past $900 million in assets. Together, the moves reflect a growing pattern of traditional finance and crypto-native treasury companies alike treating Ethereum less as a speculative trading asset and more as core infrastructure worth holding directly, whether through tokenized funds or, in BitMine's case, an outright bid for a meaningful share of the network's total supply, as detailed in the company's own announcement. As that supply share climbs closer to the 5% mark BitMine set out to reach, the accumulation itself becomes a market factor worth watching, given how much of ETH's float a single treasury vehicle would then control.
