Bulletin · BBC StocksTom Lee's Ethereum treasury firm has pushed its holdings to roughly 5.93 million ETH, putting it within reach of a goal no company has chased on this scale before. BitMine Immersion Technologies disclosed last week that it bought another 28,086 ETH, worth about $69.5 million at the time of purchase, bringing its total stash to approximately 5.93 million ether. That's close to 4.9% of Ethereum's entire 120.7 million circulating supply, and it puts the company at roughly 97% of the way toward what chairman Tom Lee calls the "Alchemy of 5%," a self-declared target to own 5% of all ether within 15 months of launching the strategy.
No corporate treasury has ever tried to lock up this much of a major blockchain's supply. Michael Saylor's Strategy built the playbook on bitcoin, buying relentlessly and daring the market to call the bluff. BitMine is running the same play on ether, and it's running it faster: the company only began its ETH accumulation strategy in mid-2026, and in roughly a year it has become the largest publicly traded holder of Ethereum anywhere, according to data compiled by The Block's treasury tracker.
Lee isn't shy about what he's trying to do. He has framed the 5% threshold not as a vanity number but as a structural bet: pull enough ether permanently out of circulation, through buying and staking rather than trading, and you change the supply dynamics of the asset itself. It's a bet that ether behaves less like a speculative token once a large enough chunk of it sits locked in one balance sheet, earning staking yield instead of flowing through exchanges.
The accumulation isn't just about the number on a press release. BitMine has built MAVAN, short for Made in America VAlidator Network, its own institutional-grade Ethereum staking platform. As of its most recent disclosure, more than 3.1 million of BitMine's ETH sits staked through the network, which the company says it designed first to serve its own treasury and now intends to open to outside custodians and asset managers.
At the yields BitMine has cited, in the 2.7% to 2.9% range, a treasury the size of its current holdings could throw off hundreds of millions of dollars a year in staking income alone, turning a speculative bet on ether's price into something closer to a yield-bearing business. That's the real difference from a simple buy-and-hold strategy. BitMine isn't just stacking coins and waiting.
It's building infrastructure around the holding itself, so the treasury earns a return whether or not ether's price moves. That's the deal. Total crypto and cash holdings at BitMine now run close to $16 billion, according to the company's own disclosures, a figure that also includes a small bitcoin position, hundreds of millions in cash and marketable securities, and equity stakes in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings.
The ether alone, at recent prices in the $2,500 range, accounts for the overwhelming majority of that. What happens when the buying stops Here's the question every trader watching this is actually asking: what happens to ether once BitMine hits its number and slows down. A buyer that has been absorbing tens of thousands of ETH a week, sometimes over 50,000 in a single week according to the company's own announcements, is a meaningful chunk of net new demand in a market where daily volume can swing on far smaller flows.
Pull that buyer out, even partially, and the supply-demand balance that's propped up the price shifts. Lee's answer, implicitly, is that MAVAN changes the equation. If BitMine keeps the ether staked rather than flipping it, the supply doesn't come back onto the market even after the buying slows.
The coins stay locked, earning yield, functionally retired from circulation. Whether that holds up once BitMine stops being a forced buyer is the open question nobody can answer yet. Not even Lee.
There's also a more mundane risk sitting underneath the ambition. BitMine has funded much of its accumulation through equity issuance, raising cash by selling BMNR shares and plowing the proceeds into ether. That only works cleanly while the stock trades at a premium to the value of the ether it holds.
BMNR has swung wildly this year, trading as high as $161 and as low as under $4, and its current levels sit well off that high. A sustained discount to net asset value would make the same playbook that built this treasury a lot harder to keep running. Frankly, the experiment is the story here, not the number itself.
Whether a single company can functionally corner 5% of a major blockchain's supply and make it stick is something crypto has never had a live test case for at this scale. BitMine is now 97% of the way to finding out. Also read: Solana Cuts Transaction Finality to 150 Milliseconds With Alpenglow • Coinbase Links US and Offshore Crypto Derivatives Markets via Deribit • Western Union and MoneyGram launch rival dollar stablecoins to survive crypto This article is posted in Crypto News , check it out for more related stories.
Source: Startup Fortune
