Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) now owns 4.87 million ether worth $10.7 billion and is 81% of the way toward its goal of owning 5% of the entire ETH supply, according to a statement on Monday that also included Chairman Tom Lee calling ether “the store of value in wartime.”
BMNR shares are down 2.25% premarket alongside ether’s weekend drop to $2,199. The stock is down 32% so far this year.
Lee pointed to ETH’s 17.4% gain since the Iran war began seven weeks ago, outperforming the S&P 500 by 1,830 basis points and gold by 2,743 basis points.
“We believe ETH outperformed gold by 2,743 basis points and proves that ETH is the store of value in times of war,” Lee said.
The company purchased 71,524 ETH last week, maintaining its elevated buying pace for the fourth consecutive week and matching the highest accumulation rate since late December 2025. Lee said that “Bitmine’s base case is that ETH is in the final stages of the mini cryptocurrency winter.”
Betting has become an important line of income. Bitmine has 3,334,637 ETH at stake, representing 68% of its holdings and $7.4 billion in value, generating $212 million in annualized staking revenue with a 7-day return of 2.89%.
Total holdings, including cash and what the company calls “moonshots,” amount to $11.8 billion. That includes $719 million in cash, a $200 million stake in Beast Industries and an $85 million position in Eightco Holdings, which Bitmine described as “one of the only publicly traded stocks in the world that gives investors direct exposure to OpenAI.”
The company entered the New York Stock Exchange from NYSE American on April 9, trading under BMNR with average daily dollar volume of $747 million, ranking 117th among all US-listed stocks. The institutional investor base includes ARK’s Cathie Wood, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, and Lee personally.
Lee cited the “tokenization of Wall Street on the blockchain” and “agent AI systems that increasingly need public, neutral blockchains” as two tailwinds for Ethereum, framing the asset as a play of both institutional adoption and AI infrastructure rather than a simple DeFi token.
Bitmine ranks as the world’s largest corporate ether hoard and the second-largest crypto hoard overall behind Strategy’s 766,970 BTC.
