Tom Lee's Bitmine buys 42,197 ETH worth $74m

Bitmine Immersion Technologies added 42,197 ETH to its treasury last week for about $74 million, lifting the company’s Ethereum holdings to 5.74 million ETH and moving the company even closer to reaching its stated goal of owning 5% of all ETH in circulation.

The new  ETH purchase, disclosed in a Monday briefing on July 6, brings Bitmine’s total holdings to 5,742,237 ETH. That equals 4.8% of the 120.7 million Ethereum in supply. The company is now 95% of the way to its 5% target and expects to get there before the end of the year. Reaching the 5% mark would require holding about 6.04 million ETH if supply holds near current levels.

At an ETH price of around $1,750 to $1,800, the Bitmine stash is worth somewhere between $10 billion and $10.3 billion. Bitmine is the largest corporate holder of Ethereum and the second-largest digital asset treasury company behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy.

Buying pace gets even faster

Last week’s ETH buy was larger than the 27,084 ETH the company picked up the week before then. However, the numbers still trail the six-figure weekly purchases Bitmine posted earlier in the year when the crypto market looked healthier.

The company also reported 206 Bitcoin on the books, $527 million in cash and marketable securities, and equity positions in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings. When added up, all these holdings equal approximately $11.1 billion.

This purchase is in wild contrast to recent moves from Strategy, which sold roughly $216 million in Bitcoin last week to raise cash. Ethereum outperformed Bitcoin by 6% over the past week, after a long slide downwards that began in August.

Chairman Lee ties purchases to CLARITY Act

Chairman Thomas Lee linked ETH’s recent strength, and his company’s continued accumulation, to growing odds that the CLARITY Act, a U.S. crypto market-structure bill, becomes law. “Over the past few days, investors have become more optimistic about the passage of the Clarity Act,” Lee said. He put the probability at about 50% on prediction markets, which will be the highest probability reading in the last two weeks.

Lee added that regulatory certainty would help smart-contract platforms like Ethereum, as crypto pushes further into payments. He cited Ethereum layer-2 networks, blockchains built on top of Ethereum to lower fees, already handling USDC transactions for companies like Shopify and Visa.

ETH staking doing Bitmine’s heavy lifting

Bitmine has said 4,879,157 ETH, which amounts to about 85% of its holdings, is staked and earning validator rewards. This translates to a projected staking income of about $235 million per year, at a seven-day yield of 2.68%.

Bitmine said the figure would rise to about $277 million if its entire ETH stash was staked. The company runs the staking through MAVAN, its Made in America Validator Network, which was built for its own treasury but may be open to institutions and custodians later in the future.

Bitmine has also widened its reach in public markets. The company joined the Russell 1000 large-cap index in June, in a move Lee claimed could draw “hundreds and possibly thousands” of new institutional investors. The company completed a Series A preferred stock offering also in June, trading on the NYSE under the ticker BMNP with a 9.5% annual dividend.

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