Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Bitmine is just one step away from achieving its 5% ETH holding target.
On November 10, digital asset reserve company Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR) disclosed its latest holdings report. Over the past week, the company further increased its holdings by 9,587 ETH, bringing its total holdings to 6,070,092 ETH, valued at approximately $13.6 billion, or 4.97% of Ethereum’s current total supply. According to the company’s official statement, this percentage has reached 99% of its strategic goal to hold 5% of Ethereum’s total supply.
The 5% holding target was established by Bitmine as a long-term plan when launching its ETH treasury strategy on June 30, 2025. Bitmine officially refers to this initiative as “The Alchemy of 5%”—a figure chosen because, in traditional U.S. stock markets, 5% is the threshold that triggers mandatory SEC Schedule 13D disclosure, signifying when a single shareholder begins to wield substantial influence.
At the Token2049 conference this October, Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee reiterated that 5% will serve as the hard cap for Bitmine’s ETH holdings, and the company will not continue to acquire more ETH beyond this threshold. In other words, once this final 1% purchase is completed, Bitmine’s year-long ETH buying campaign will be put on hold.
Net buying volume will inevitably decline; no one can replace Bitmine.
As Bitmine approaches its position limit, the market is continuously seeking potential successors—such as second-tier Ethereum treasuries (DATs) like SharpLink (holding approximately 870,000 ETH) and The Ether Machine (holding approximately 496,000 ETH), or anticipating significant inflows of capital into spot ETFs.
Objectively speaking, it is unrealistic to expect these forces to “replace” Bitmine, for a simple reason: secondary DATs and spot ETFs are not incremental narratives—they already exist on the table.
Over the past year, every price movement of ETH has already accounted for the combined influence of Bitmine, secondary DAT treasuries, and ETF funds. Moreover, ETF funds exhibit strong pro-cyclical characteristics (buying higher during rallies and redeeming during downturns), while secondary treasuries, constrained by their market capitalization and mNAV discounts, struggle to replicate Bitmine’s early-stage counter-cyclical dollar-cost averaging—consistently buying regardless of market conditions, week after week.
Therefore, we don’t need to seek psychological comfort by claiming that “other forces will step in” for ETH. Once Bitmine reaches its 5% cap and stops increasing its holdings, it objectively means, from an arithmetic standpoint, that the market has lost a consistent and rigid net buying force.
The real core issue worth discussing is: what is the actual impact on ETH of this disappearance of net buying pressure?
Although 6 million tokens represent a large volume, the period of aggressive buying has long passed.
Looking solely at the total volume, 6.07 million ETH, worth a staggering $13.6 billion, would inevitably have a massive impact on ETH. As the world’s second-largest cryptocurrency treasury after Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), Bitmine alone has absorbed nearly 5% of the entire network’s supply, with over 80% of its ETH locked in staking nodes. Such a significant buyer exiting the secondary market sounds like a “hemorrhagic bearish” event.
However, if we look back at Bitmine’s actual accumulation curve over the past 16 months, we find a more accurate reflection of the current situation—Bitmine’s aggressive accumulation phase has already passed, and its purchasing speed slows as it gets closer to the 5% target.
Combining The Block’s treasury tracking data with Bitmine’s disclosed holdings over time, we can clearly observe the changes in Bitmine’s quarterly buying slope.
The data clearly shows that Bitmine's true "aggressive accumulation" was almost entirely concentrated in the second half of 2025, during which it acquired over 4.1 million ETH in just six months at an astonishing rate of 100,000 to 200,000 ETH per week.
However, since the second half of 2026, particularly from the third quarter onward, as its holdings approached the 5% target and BMNR’s own stock entered a discount range, its purchasing pace has significantly slowed. Over the past two months, Bitmine’s weekly net ETH purchases have remained between 8,000 and 15,000 ETH, equivalent to just $20 million to $30 million per week.
For the ETH market, where daily trading volumes routinely reach tens of billions of dollars and spot ETFs can easily experience net inflows or outflows of over $100 million in a single day, weekly buying pressure in the range of $20 million has had very limited actual upward impact on ETH prices over the past several months.
There's no need to panic—the market has long since adapted to life without Bitmine.
In summary, Bitmine is about to complete the final stage of its “5% alchemy,” which indeed means ETH has lost a notable off-exchange net buyer on paper. However, there’s no need for the market to panic over a sudden lack of buying pressure—because the most aggressive incremental buying had already subsided six months ago, and the secondary market has already adapted and absorbed the absence of Bitmine’s net purchases through months of volatility.
When the final gap of approximately 35,000 ETH is filled, what disappears is only a weak marginal buying pressure of around 10,000 ETH per week; what remains for Ethereum is 6.07 million ETH permanently locked in treasury and staking nodes.
The narrative of Bitmine as a "buying engine" may soon come to an end, but this year-and-a-half-long chip-locking experiment has already fulfilled its historical mission.
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