Tom Lee's Bitmine Keeps Buying Ethereum But Pivots to Record Share Buybacks
In brief
- Bitmine added 10,452 ETH to reach 6,051,933 ETH, extending its weekly buying streak and nearing its 5% “Alchemy of 5%” goal.
- The week’s bigger move was a share buyback: Bitmine repurchased 2.04 million shares, lifting its 2026 total to 22.9 million shares for ~$399.6 million, which chairman Tom Lee called the largest ever by a crypto treasury firm.
- It mirrors Strategy, which paused Bitcoin buying this week to spend $204.9 million on STRC buybacks—both giants favoring their shares over fresh crypto.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies kept its weekly Ethereum buying streak intact, adding 10,452 ETH worth roughly $24 million, but the bigger move this week was a turn toward buying back its own stock, which the company says is now the largest equity repurchase program any crypto treasury firm has run.
The NYSE-listed firm said Monday it repurchased 2.04 million of its own shares over the past week at an average price of $22.48, bringing its 2026 total to 22.9 million shares bought back for about $399.6 million.
Chairman Tom Lee framed the buybacks as a value play, saying the company intends to repurchase stock “accretively” when management views the shares as undervalued.
The ETH purchase lifts Bitmine’s holdings to 6,051,933 ETH, worth roughly $14.3 billion at a reference price of $2,356 per coin. That’s 4.95% of Ethereum’s 122.2 million token supply, leaving the firm, by its own count, 99% of the way to its goal of owning 5% of the network, a target it brands the “Alchemy of 5%.”
Lee has said Bitmine is nearly finished stacking and will stop buying once it hits that threshold. (Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)
→Lee again cast recent crypto weakness as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign, arguing the pullback stemmed from the same risk-off forces behind a broader AI selloff. He noted ETH had fallen 13% from its recent peak while U.S. semiconductor stocks dropped 20% over the same stretch, which he said was further evidence “a crypto bull market is underway.”
Counting cash, other tokens and what it calls “moonshot” investments, Bitmine’s total holdings stood at $15 billion as of Oct. 25, including 215 Bitcoin, $514 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $76 million position in Eightco Holdings.
Bitmine remains the world’s largest Ethereum treasury and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, trailing only Michael Saylor’s Strategy.
Strategy leaned the same way this week, pausing its Bitcoin buying for the first time since mid-September to spend $204.9 million buying back its STRC preferred stock, underscoring how both treasury giants pivoted toward shoring up their shares over fresh crypto purchases.
Bitmine has 5,227,037 ETH, about 86% of its holdings, staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized staking revenue of roughly $318 million.
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