Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) added 9,587 ether to its treasury over the past week, a purchase worth roughly $20 million that lifts the company's holdings to 6,070,092 tokens, or 4.97% of Ethereum's 122.2 million supply.
The NYSE-listed firm said in a Monday release that it has now completed 99% of its stated goal of acquiring 5% of the network, a target it markets as the "Alchemy of 5%," 15 months after launching the strategy on June 30, 2025. Bitmine has bought ether every week since then, according to the company.
At a reference price of $2,234 per coin, the ether stack is worth about $13.6 billion. Counting cash, other tokens and what the company calls "moonshot" investments, total holdings stood at $14.3 billion as of Nov. 8.
Note: Figures as of Nov. 8, 2026, per the company release.
About 5,227,037 ether, or roughly 86% of the position, is staked through Bitmine's MAVAN platform. The company put the value of that staked balance at $11.1 billion and projected annualized staking revenue of about $359 million once the full position is deployed, up from $309 million at present.
Chairman Tom Lee anchored the announcement to remarks made by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin at the Devcon 8 developer conference in Mumbai, where Buterin declared: "I've finally made up my mind, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money." Lee described the statement as "a seismic shift" and said it clarifies how the token will capture value in what he called a coming supercycle of tokenization and artificial intelligence.
In Lee's framing, ether was never designed to function like a cash-flow token such as HYPE or LIT. He instead casts it as "pristine and trusted collateral" -- the base layer that financial institutions have already chosen for moving assets on-chain. Buterin later expanded on his position in a post on X, citing three reasons for treating ether primarily as a store of value: fee-burning has not proved as powerful a value driver as expected, optimizing for it can conflict with decentralization and capture resistance, and prioritizing store-of-value characteristics better matches Ethereum's core strengths.
Bitmine remains the largest corporate ether holder and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, behind only Michael Saylor's Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), which the release said holds about 849,327 bitcoin, a position worth roughly $69 billion. The company also holds a $75 million stake in Eightco Holdings, which it bills as a rare listed proxy for indirect exposure to OpenAI.
The disclosure landed against a weak tape for the stock. Bitmine shares fell more than 4% in premarket trading and were approaching historical support near $17.80, trading below a broken rising trendline and all four major moving averages -- a configuration that keeps the technical picture bearish.
The gap between the company's accumulation pace and its share price underscores the bet Lee is making: that ether's role as institutional collateral, rather than its fee economics, will drive value as tokenization and AI workloads migrate on-chain. Reaching the final 1% of the 5% target would require roughly another 3.1 million tokens at current supply levels, a purchase that at recent prices would run into the billions of dollars.
For the broader market, Bitmine's weekly buying has become a visible, if modest, source of demand. The company's staked position of more than 5.2 million ether also makes it one of the largest validators on the network, giving it a recurring revenue stream that is largely independent of token price. Whether that yield and the treasury's size translate into a higher valuation for BMNR depends on how investors price a leveraged, single-asset balance sheet against the underlying coin.
