Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) added 9,587 ETH over the past week, bringing its stack to 6,070,092 ETH, or 4.97% of Ethereum’s 122.2 million token supply, the company said on Monday.
By Unchained’s math, 5% of the ETH supply comes to 6.11 million ETH. That leaves Bitmine roughly 39,900 ETH short of chairman Tom Lee’s goal, or about $89 million at the $2,234 per-token price the company used. At last week’s pace, the remaining amount would take a little over four weeks to buy.
Lee has framed the 5% mark as a stopping point. “Tom Lee said he won’t hold more than 5% of ETH supply. Currently he holds about 4.9%. That could have some implications,” host Austin Campbell said on Unchained’s Bits + Bips in October, recapping Lee’s comments at the Token2049 conference. Co-host Chris Perkins, who said he shared a panel with Lee there, recalled Lee saying, “I’m not gonna go above 5%.”
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$14.3 Billion on the Books
Bitmine put its total holdings at $14.3 billion as of 2 p.m. ET on Nov. 8. Besides the ETH, that figure includes 216 BTC, $475 million in cash and marketable securities, and two equity bets the company calls “moonshots”: a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $75 million stake in Eightco Holdings (ORBS).
Of its ETH, Bitmine said 5,227,037 tokens, worth about $11.7 billion, are staked, roughly 86% of the total. Part of that runs on MAVAN (Made in America VAlidator Network), a staking platform the company launched earlier this year and has opened to institutional clients. Lee said staking all of its ETH would earn about $359 million a year at Bitmine’s trailing seven-day yield of 2.65%, compared with about $309 million on what is staked now.
‘ETH Is Money’
Lee in Monday’s statement also pointed to a remark by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at Devcon 8, the Ethereum developer conference held in Mumbai, that “ETH is a store of value, ETH is money.” Lee called it “a seismic shift, clarifying how ETH will capture value in this coming supercycle of tokenization and AI.”
In Lee’s view, ETH is not a “‘cash flow’ token model” but “pristine and trusted collateral.” He added that a store-of-value role “is most consistent with the future roadmap of ETH and also the role ETH will play in the coming super tokenization supercycle.”
Related Listen: Vitalik Finally Says ETH Matters. Zak Cole: ‘Should Have Said That 5 Years Ago’
