Tom Lee’s Bitmine Buys Another 9,587 ETH, Holdings Near 5% of Supply

Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought another 9,587 ETH in the week to 8 November, lifting its Ethereum treasury to 6,070,092 coins, the NYSE-listed company said in its own press release. That is 4.97% of Ethereum's 122.2 million token supply, which Bitmine counts as 99% of the way to a 5% target it calls the "Alchemy of 5%", and roughly 40,000 ETH short of the point where chairman Tom Lee says the steady buying stops.

The release values those coins at $13.6 billion using a reference price of $2,234 per ETH. Add 216 Bitcoin, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries, a $75 million stake in Eightco Holdings and $475 million in cash and marketable securities, and Bitmine puts total holdings at $14.3 billion as of 8 November.

• The news: Bitmine bought 9,587 ETH in the week to 8 November and now holds 6,070,092 ETH, or 4.97% of supply.
• The key figure: at $2,234 per coin the ETH is worth about $13.6 billion, and the stake sits roughly 40,000 ETH short of 5%.
• What happens next: Bitmine says it has bought ETH every week since 30 June 2025; Lee has said the steady purchases stop once 5% is reached.

The Last 40,000 ETH Between Bitmine and Its Cap

The arithmetic is simple. Five percent of Ethereum's 122.2 million token supply is the target, and Bitmine reports holding 6,070,092 coins, roughly 40,000 ETH short. Lee has said the firm plans to stop steadily buying at that level, which makes the next few weekly purchases the ones that matter.

The buying has not gone into a wallet to sit. Bitmine has 5,227,037 ETH staked, about 86% of its holdings, worth $11.7 billion at the $2,234 reference price, through its MAVAN staking platform. The release projects $359 million in annualized staking rewards once the treasury is fully staked, using a trailing seven-day yield of 2.65%, against roughly $309 million at current levels.

On the week's purchase, Lee tied the firm's record to its strategy start date. "Over the past week, we acquired 9,587 ETH. Bitmine's track record of consistent buying of crypto is unmatched by any public company in the world. Bitmine has bought ETH each week since the inception of the ETH Treasury Strategy on June 30, 2025," he said in the release.

Why Tom Lee Is Quoting Vitalik Buterin

The release leans hard on comments it attributes to Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin at Devcon 8 in Mumbai, where it says he declared, "I've finally made up my mind, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money." Lee called that declaration a turning point for how the asset captures value.

"This declaration by the founder of Ethereum, in my view, is a seismic shift, clarifying how ETH will capture value in this coming supercycle of tokenization and AI," Lee said. He added that ETH is not a "cash flow" token model like HYPE or LIT, but "pristine and trusted collateral", and the Layer 1 most financial institutions pick when they move assets onchain.

That framing does two jobs at once. It is a defence of Bitmine's single-token treasury, and it borrows the credibility of Ethereum's founder to make it.

The Devcon remarks and a follow-up Buterin post on X could not be read at the source; both are stated here as the release and news reports relay them.

What Buterin's Store-of-Value Case Actually Says

The release says Buterin expanded his view in an X post with three reasons for treating ETH as a store of value. First, fee burning is weaker than it once seemed. Second, optimizing for fee burning may not be compatible with decentralization and capture resistance. Third, optimizing for store-of-value use fits Ethereum's decentralization and CROPS strengths.

That matters for a treasury holder because it moves the case for ETH away from network fees and toward scarcity and settlement. If Buterin is right that burn revenue was never the floor, the investment case rests more on ETH being held and staked than on it being spent.

What to Watch, and Where the Numbers Disagree

Bitmine remains the largest Ethereum treasury and, by the release's count, the second-largest crypto treasury overall, behind Strategy, which the release says holds about 849,327 BTC. Other reports put Strategy's Bitcoin count and dollar value at different figures, so treat that comparison as the release's own.

The release also notes Bitmine was added to the Russell 1000 Large-cap index on 26 June 2026, and that its Series A Preferred Stock trades on the NYSE as BMNP.

The observable trigger is the weekly update. Bitmine has closed almost the whole gap to 5%, and Lee says the steady buying ends there. The next filing either shows the gap shrinking again or shows that the strategy has changed.

Dollar values here come from Bitmine's own reference price of $2,234 per ETH; news reports of the same week used lower ETH prices and reached smaller figures for the holdings.