BitMine Immersion Technologies, the New York-listed mining company chaired by Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee, surprised the market with a jaw-dropping announcement on January 26. The filing revealed that BitMine now holds 4,243,338 ether—roughly 3.52% of Ethereum’s entire circulating supply. At around $2,840 per coin at the time, that position was worth close to $12 billion, instantly making BitMine the largest single holder of ETH in the world. It’s also the second-largest public-company crypto treasury ever, trailing only Strategy Inc.’s enormous bitcoin stash.
What makes this even more remarkable is how quietly it happened. Internal purchase records show that BitMine has been systematically accumulating ether since late October 2025. The company was buying at least 25,000 ETH most weeks, with purchases ramping up during December’s market downturn when prices dipped toward $2,500. In the most recent week alone, they added over 40,000 ETH. Management describes their strategy as “liquidity-sensitive averaging,” using a mix of spot purchases and short-dated call options to keep costs down.
BitMine trades on the NYSE American under the ticker BMNR. Shares were hovering around $28.50 after the announcement—down slightly as investors tried to balance the upside of holding billions in crypto against the risks that come with it. Interestingly, the company’s market cap sits at just under $4 billion, well below the stated value of its ether holdings. It’s a familiar dynamic that early MicroStrategy investors will recognize: an “asset-rich, equity-cheap” puzzle that the market is still figuring out how to price.
Turning Ether Into Cash Flow Through Staking
BitMine isn’t just sitting on a pile of ether. As of January 25, the company had already staked 2,009,267 ETH—nearly half of its total holdings—through third-party validators. That stake is earning an estimated 2.8% annual yield, which works out to roughly $374 million a year, or more than $1 million every single day. Not bad for a passive income stream.
But this is just the beginning. BitMine plans to launch its own validator infrastructure in early 2026, which it’s calling the Made-in-America Validator Network, or MAVAN. By running their own nodes, the company expects to cut out the middleman fees that currently eat up 5–10% of staking rewards. They’ll also be able to capture additional revenue from MEV (maximal extractable value) and future restaking opportunities. More importantly, it shifts the narrative from being just another balance-sheet play to something closer to crypto infrastructure—a “crypto-industrial” company, as management puts it.
Of course, there are regulatory hurdles. The SEC hasn’t provided clear guidance on how public companies should account for staking income, and recent enforcement actions against centralized staking providers have muddied the waters. BitMine argues that their setup is different. Because they’ll own and operate the validators themselves—distributed across U.S. data centers and separate from any retail activity—they believe it fits within existing accounting and securities rules. Time will tell if regulators agree.
What This Means for Ethereum and the Broader Market
BitMine’s disclosure came at an interesting time. Ether was already down about 10% for the month, weighed down by high funding costs and speculation around spot ETF flows. The news that a single company had quietly pulled more than four million coins out of circulation changes the equation. Free-float liquidity on exchanges is now at levels not seen since before the Merge, and on-chain data shows that long-term holders are digging in at higher price levels.
Tom Lee has said publicly that BitMine’s goal is to eventually own 5% of all ether—around six million coins. Some traders think that kind of accumulation creates a natural price floor. Others worry about what happens if BitMine ever decides to sell. Either way, the market now has to price in the reality that one of the largest holders of ETH is a publicly traded company with fiduciary duties to shareholders, not a decentralized foundation or anonymous whale.
There are also bigger questions about what this means for Ethereum’s decentralization. At 3.5% ownership, BitMine already holds more ether than all but the four largest exchanges. If they hit their 5% target, they could control around 160,000 validators—enough to potentially influence contentious governance decisions if they wanted to. Ethereum developers argue that the network’s client diversity and social consensus mechanisms provide safeguards, but it’s hard to ignore the tension. Proof-of-Stake rewards capital, and increasingly, that capital is corporate.
Still, traditional finance seems to be warming up to the idea. Behind closed doors at Davos, insiders pointed to tokenization projects, on-chain treasury bills, and AI-powered settlement systems as reasons why institutional demand for ETH could grow even further. Tom Lee’s bet—that Ethereum will become the backbone of institutional fintech—doesn’t sound so crazy when you see a multi-billion-dollar public company putting its balance sheet where its mouth is.
