Bitmine Buys 111K ETH as Staking Drives Treasury Revenue
Bitmine Immersion Technologies acquired 111,942 ETH last week for approximately $237 million, its largest single purchase of 2026, bringing total holdings to 5,390,404 ETH. The buy came as Ethereum traded near $2,078.53, down 0.91% in the past 24 hours and roughly 58% below its August 2025 all-time high of $4,946. Combined with a new Everstake report showing staking now drives 60% of disclosed revenue at publicly listed ETH treasury firms, the week’s developments draw a clear picture of where the digital asset treasury model is heading.
Bitmine’s Conviction Purchase at $2,100
Bitmine chairman Tom Lee framed the acquisition as a direct response to price weakness. “We view the recent pullback of ETH to below $2,200 as an attractive opportunity,” Lee said in a Monday statement. He added that Ethereum has traded between $2,025 and $2,147 over the past seven days, a range that the firm treated as a structural entry point rather than a warning signal. The purchase is notable because, just weeks earlier at the Consensus 2026 conference in Miami, Lee had publicly indicated the company planned to slow its weekly accumulation to avoid reaching its 5% supply target too quickly.
That target, which Bitmine calls its “5% Alchemy” strategy, now sits at 88% completion. At 5,390,404 ETH, the firm controls approximately 4.47% of the 120.7 million ETH in circulation. Lee said the remaining 644,596 ETH needed to cross the 5% threshold should be acquired sometime this year. The company’s total crypto, cash, and strategic holdings stand at $12.3 billion, which includes 203 Bitcoin, $444 million in cash reserves, and equity stakes in Beast Industries and Eightco Holdings.
BMNR shares advanced roughly 3.3% on Tuesday, trading near $19.51. That gain is set against a difficult longer-term chart: the stock is down approximately 12% over the trailing month and has shed more than 38% over the past six months. The firm also reported a $9.02 billion net loss for the six months ended February 28, though Everstake’s analysis confirms that figure was driven overwhelmingly by unrealized losses on digital assets rather than operating performance. The distinction matters when evaluating whether the business model is viable.
Bitcoin BTC$63,784.00▲1.26%
Ethereum ETH$1,672.16▲0.82%
Tether USDT$0.9994▲0.08%
BNB BNB$602.89▲0.59%
USDC USDC$0.9998▲0.03%
XRP XRP$1.14▲0.86%
Solana SOL$67.16▲1.46%
TRON TRX$0.3154▲0.75%
Figure Heloc FIGR_HELOC$1.03▲0.07%
Dogecoin DOGE$0.0869▲1.66%Staking as Structural Revenue: What Everstake Found
A report released Tuesday by staking infrastructure provider Everstake reviewed 15 publicly listed ETH treasury companies and reached a conclusion that should reshape how investors evaluate these firms. Among the six companies that separately disclosed staking-related income, including Bitmine, SharpLink, Bit Digital, Forum Markets, BTCS, and FG Nexus, staking accounted for an average of 60% of reported revenue. Bit Digital alone reported $7 million in ETH staking rewards for 2025, a 287% year-over-year increase. The combined net losses across the broader cohort totalled $1.41 billion.
Everstake co-founder and COO Bohdan Opryshko described the shift in direct terms: “Those that actively deploy capital are setting the new standard. That deployment is no longer limited to standard protocol staking. It includes liquid staking, integration into DeFi lending markets, and more advanced validator-level strategies such as optimized block construction and MEV capture.” His point is that yield generation has moved from a bonus feature to a core operational requirement. Passive accumulation, once sufficient to attract a public-market premium, is losing that premium to spot ETH ETFs, which give investors cleaner, cheaper exposure without the balance sheet complexity.
Bitmine’s own staking operation illustrates the scale possible at the top end. The company has staked over 4.7 million ETH, approximately 87% of its total holdings, through its proprietary Made in America Validator Network (MAVAN). Projected annualized staking revenue from that infrastructure exceeds $276 million. That figure dwarfs the operating losses most treasury firms report and provides a genuine cash-flow argument for the model, though Opryshko was careful to note that staking yield is “necessary, though not sufficient” when other pressures such as dilution, financing costs, and ETH price volatility are factored in.
Ignacio Aguirre, chief marketing officer at Bitget, offered a measured counterpoint: “I would not over-attribute it to spot ETFs alone.” He noted that ETH treasury companies remain equity vehicles, meaning investors weigh ETH price performance, balance sheet quality, dilution risk, and broader market sentiment alongside ETF competition. He also characterised staking-enabled ETH ETFs as “more complementary than existential threats” to treasury firms, a view that differs from Everstake’s more urgent framing. On balance, Everstake’s data on treasury revenue composition is more credible here: the 60% staking-revenue figure is drawn from actual filings, while the ETF-as-complement argument relies on an assumption that passive-exposure premiums will hold despite clear evidence of their erosion.
SharpLink Enters the Russell Indexes
SharpLink Gaming (SBET), the Ethereum treasury company backed by Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin, will join both the Russell 2000 and Russell 3000 indexes when FTSE Russell completes its annual reconstitution after markets close on June 29. The Russell indexes have approximately $12.2 trillion in investor assets benchmarked to them, and inclusion in the Russell 2000, the benchmark for small-cap U.S. equities, typically generates automatic buying from passive index funds and ETFs during rebalancing. SharpLink CEO Joseph Chalom said the inclusion validates the company’s “institutional-grade ETH treasury strategy” and can strengthen its “access to capital markets.”
The context around that validation is complicated. SharpLink held 872,984 ETH as of its latest quarterly earnings report in early May, making it the second-largest public ETH treasury behind Bitmine. At current prices, that position is worth roughly $1.8 billion. However, the firm has not reported any ETH purchases since October, and its stock has fallen approximately 95% from its peak last May when investors piled into crypto treasury firms during a broader digital asset rally. The shares remain more than double their pre-pivot level, and were down about 2% on Tuesday in line with ETH’s own decline.
SharpLink also posted a $734.6 million net loss on $28.1 million in revenue for FY2025, the largest single-firm loss in Everstake’s cohort by a wide margin. The Russell inclusion provides a genuine catalyst for trading volume and institutional ownership, but it does not resolve the underlying question of whether a firm holding a static ETH position and generating $28 million in revenue can sustain a strategy at that scale. As our earlier analysis of Ethereum’s pricing pressure through May showed, the structural repricing affecting the asset class extends well beyond any single treasury firm’s balance sheet.
Tom Lee’s Supercycle Thesis: Evidence and Risk
Lee has consistently tied Bitmine’s accumulation strategy to a macro thesis: that Ethereum is entering a supercycle driven by two converging forces, Wall Street tokenization and the adoption of agentic artificial intelligence. “We continue to expect a supercycle ahead for crypto and Ethereum, driven by the dual drivers of Wall Street tokenization and agentic AI. And thus, we continue to steadily acquire ETH, with Bitmine now owning nearly 5.4 million ETH tokens,” Lee said in his Monday statement. The thesis has long-term coherence: institutional tokenization activity on Ethereum is accelerating, and AI agents operating on-chain will need programmable, trust-minimised settlement infrastructure.
The near-term data does not yet support the supercycle framing, and Lee’s credibility here requires scrutiny. ETH is currently trading at $2,078.53, down 58% from its August 2025 peak. The more than 39.2 million ETH currently staked, representing 32.19% of supply with another 3.3 million in the validator entry queue, shows genuine network commitment, but it has not translated into price recovery. Bitmine is acquiring an asset that, by its own accounting, has generated $9 billion in unrealized losses in six months. Lee’s argument is essentially that the market is wrong about ETH’s value relative to its infrastructure role, and that accumulating through the drawdown is the rational response to that mispricing.
That argument is worth taking seriously, precisely because it is grounded in infrastructure utility rather than speculation. The Glamsterdam upgrade earlier this year tripled Ethereum’s gas capacity, tokenized asset pipelines from institutions like BlackRock are live on the network, and the staking yield available through validators like MAVAN creates a compounding position rather than a static hold. The risk, which Lee does not dwell on, is that the supercycle arrives too slowly or at a price level that cannot offset the financing costs and dilution Bitmine has incurred to reach 4.47% of supply.
Who Benefits and Who Faces Pressure
The week’s data points toward a clear bifurcation in the ETH treasury model. Firms that have built active staking infrastructure at scale, primarily Bitmine through MAVAN, are generating material yield that partially insulates them from ETH price movements and gives institutional investors a reason to own the equity rather than simply buying a spot ETF. Bitmine’s $276 million in projected annualized staking revenue is a real operating asset, not a paper gain, and its forthcoming Russell 1000 inclusion will bring additional passive inflows from index funds that track the 1,000 largest U.S. companies.
Firms that hold large ETH positions without comparable yield infrastructure face a harder road. SharpLink’s 872,984 ETH holding is substantial, but the absence of reported purchases since October and the scale of its FY2025 losses raise legitimate questions about capital discipline. The Russell 2000 inclusion is a positive structural event, yet index membership does not create staking revenue or resolve a 95% drawdown from peak. Smaller treasury firms that lack both scale and yield strategy face the most direct pressure: the Everstake report identified combined losses of $1.41 billion across its cohort, and the firms without dedicated staking disclosure are likely the ones generating the least operating return on their holdings.
The broader implication is that the digital asset treasury model is maturing into something closer to an infrastructure business than a leveraged ETH bet. Passive accumulation worked when ETH treasury stocks traded at a premium to net asset value and offered the only regulated route to Ethereum exposure. Spot ETH ETFs changed that calculus, and the firms that recognised the shift early enough to build validator networks and staking operations are now positioned to generate recurring revenue regardless of where ETH trades this month. That is a more defensible model, and one that aligns with how serious infrastructure businesses are built: through compounding operational advantage rather than asset appreciation alone. The supercycle may or may not materialise on Lee’s timeline, but the firms deploying capital actively are building something that survives either outcome.
