Tom Lee’s Bitmine Adds $20M in Ethereum, Seizing on Vitalik’s 'ETH Is Money' Declaration

Bitmine Immersion Technologies extended its weekly Ethereum buying streak, adding 9,587 ETH worth roughly $20 million, as chairman Tom Lee pointed to a recent declaration by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin as validation of the firm’s accumulation strategy.

The NYSE-listed company said Monday its holdings reached 6,070,092 ETH, worth roughly $13.6 billion at a reference price of $2,234 per coin.

That’s 4.97% 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 calls 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.

Lee leaned heavily on comments Buterin made at the Devcon conference in Mumbai, where the Ethereum founder said, “I’ve finally made up my mind, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money.” Lee called the declaration “a seismic shift,” arguing it clarifies how ETH will capture value in what he described as a coming “supercycle of tokenization and AI.” (Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt’s parent company.)

He contended ETH functions as “pristine and trusted collateral” rather than a cash-flow token, reflecting its position as the layer-1 network favored by financial institutions moving assets onchain.

Buterin elaborated in an X post, laying out why he now sees ETH primarily as a store of value, including his view that fee-burning is weaker than it once seemed and that optimizing for it can conflict with decentralization. Lee framed that reasoning as consistent with Ethereum’s roadmap and its role in the tokenization wave.

Counting cash, other tokens and “moonshot” investments, Bitmine’s total holdings stood at $14.3 billion as of Nov. 8, including 216 Bitcoin, $475 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $75 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 849,327 BTC. Bitmine has 5,227,037 ETH, roughly 86% of its holdings, staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized staking revenue of about $359 million.

The firm also recently argued the muted market reaction to the record Binance hack showed crypto’s growing resilience.