Bitmine Buys More Ethereum as Tom Lee Calls the Binance Hack Bullish

Bitmine Immersion Technologies kept its weekly Ethereum buying streak intact, adding 8,573 ETH worth roughly $19 million, while chairman Tom Lee used the record Binance hack to argue that crypto has grown more resilient, not more fragile.

The NYSE-listed company said Monday its holdings now total 6,060,506 ETH, worth roughly $13.7 billion at a reference price of $2,261 per coin.

That represents 4.9% of Ethereum’s 122.2 million token supply, leaving Bitmine, 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%,” reached in just 15 months. The firm has bought Ethereum every week since launching its treasury strategy on June 30, 2025.

Most of Lee’s commentary focused on last week’s roughly $6.4 billion theft from Binance, which the FBI has attributed to North Korea. Lee called it “a terrible development” but argued the market’s “relatively muted” reaction was “very constructive.” (Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)

Lee noted that when North Korea’s Lazarus-linked hackers drained $1.5 billion from Bybit in February 2025, Ethereum fell 8% that day and 20% within a week, whereas ETH slid just 4% after the Binance breach, despite the theft being roughly four times larger.

Lee laid out six reasons for the muted response: Binance’s ability to cover all customer losses, the absence of a cascade of DeFi failures like the one that followed Bybit, swift industry action that cut the potential loss in half, the FBI naming North Korea within two days rather than the months such attributions have taken historically, the fact that the exploit was a “corporate infiltration” of Binance’s infrastructure rather than a blockchain flaw, and the limited price downside itself, which he read as a sign a “crypto bull market is underway.”

Taken together, he said, the episode shows the industry is “increasingly resilient and more capable of absorbing these nation-state assaults.”

Counting cash, other tokens and what it calls “moonshot” investments, Bitmine’s total holdings stood at $14.5 billion as of Nov. 1, including 216 Bitcoin, $498 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and an $82 million position in Eightco Holdings, which it bills as a rare public proxy for indirect OpenAI exposure.

Bitmine remains the world’s largest Ethereum treasury and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, trailing only Michael Saylor’s Strategy, which the release said holds about 848,517 BTC.

Strategy recently resumed its own Bitcoin buying with a $66 million purchase after a brief pause.

Bitmine has 5,227,037 ETH, about 86% of its holdings, staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized staking revenue of roughly $358 million.