Bitmine Immersion Technologies is within striking distance of a goal that sounded almost absurd when it was first announced: owning 5% of all circulating Ethereum. The NYSE-listed company (ticker: BMNR) currently holds between 5.54 million and 5.77 million ETH, representing approximately 4.59% to 4.78% of the estimated 120.7 million ETH in circulation. That leaves roughly 507,000 ETH between Bitmine and its target of 6.035 million ETH.
From Bitcoin mining to Ethereum treasury
Bitmine’s journey here is one of the more dramatic corporate pivots in recent crypto history. The company originally focused on Bitcoin mining, and at some point leadership decided the better play was accumulating ETH as a primary reserve asset rather than mining BTC.
Chairman Tom Lee has been the architect of what the company calls the “alchemy of 5%.” The underlying strategy is straightforward: buy a lot of Ethereum, then buy more, then stake it for yield while continuing to buy.
The company’s total crypto and cash holdings now sit between $9.6 billion and $11.3 billion. Bitmine’s stock has become one of the most actively traded equities in the US market, with daily volumes reaching into the hundreds of millions and sometimes billions of shares.
