Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), the publicly listed Ethereum treasury company chaired by Fundstrat’s Thomas “Tom” Lee, has added approximately 101,745 ETH over the past week—its fourth consecutive week of accelerated buying—bringing total ETH holdings to 5,180,131 tokens as of May 3, 2026, per the company’s latest treasury update published Monday.
The new milestone places Bitmine’s ETH holdings at approximately 4.29% of Ethereum’s supply (currently 120.7 million tokens)—putting the company 86% of the way to its “Alchemy of 5%” target in just 10 months since pivoting from Bitcoin mining to an Ethereum treasury strategy in late June 2025 under Lee’s chairmanship.
Total Holdings Declined
Bitmine added ETH last week, but its total reported holdings slipped to $13.1 billion. That’s not a contradiction—it’s a window into how mark-to-market accounting works on a volatile underlying asset.
Last week’s 5.078 million ETH report priced ETH closer to $2,400 per token; this week’s update prices ETH at $2,336 per token. Approximately $200 million of paper value was eroded by the price decline, even as Bitmine added roughly $238 million worth of new ETH at the new lower price.
For Bitmine, the calculus is simple: growing the token count matters more than the dollar valuation in any given week because the company’s thesis is long-duration. Lee himself addressed this directly in the Monday statement: “Bitmine has maintained the increased pace of ETH buys in each of the past four weeks, as our base case ETH is in the final stages of the ‘mini-crypto winter.'”
The Composition: $13.1 Billion Across Four Buckets
The total $13.1 billion in disclosed holdings breaks down as:
- 5,180,131 ETH at $2,336 — approximately $12.1 billion
- 200 Bitcoin (BTC) — small position carried over from the Bitcoin mining era
- $200 million stake in Beast Industries — investment in MrBeast’s company
- $83 million stake in Eightco Holdings—described by Bitmine as one of the only publicly listed equities offering “indirect exposure to OpenAI”
- $700 million in cash — supporting future ETH purchases
Bitmine continues to position itself as the no. 1 Ethereum treasury globally and the no. 2 overall crypto treasury, behind only Strategy Inc. (NASDAQ: MSTR), which holds 818,334 BTC valued at approximately $64.6 billion. The Bitmine model—treating ETH as the primary treasury reserve while leveraging staking yields—has been the most aggressive corporate Ethereum accumulation strategy on record, with backers including ARK Invest’s Cathie Wood, Founders Fund, Pantera, Galaxy Digital, Bill Miller III, Kraken, and Digital Currency Group.
MAVAN: The Staking Infrastructure Doing the Yield Work
Bitmine’s reported 4,362,757 ETH staked (approximately $10.2 billion at current prices) means over 84% of total ETH holdings are now generating yield through the MAVAN (Made-in-America VAlidator Network), Bitmine’s institutional-grade staking platform.
The stated economics:
- Current 7-day staking yield: 2.91% annualised
- Annualised staking revenue at present: $297 million
- Projected revenue once fully deployed via MAVAN partners: $352 million annually
MAVAN was originally developed to support Bitmine’s own Ethereum treasury, but Lee has signaled the platform will expand to serve “institutional investors, custodians, and ecosystem partners seeking best-in-class staking infrastructure.”
That positioning is significant — if MAVAN successfully attracts third-party institutional staking, Bitmine evolves from a corporate treasury holding company into a vertically integrated ETH yield platform with both a balance-sheet position and an asset-management business.
The staking volume context: Bitmine’s 4.36 million ETH staked represents a meaningful share of Ethereum’s total staked supply, which currently stands at approximately 35 million ETH. That makes Bitmine—by some on-chain estimates—the single largest concentrated ETH staker on the network, raising legitimate questions about validator set concentration that the company has not yet publicly addressed.
“Crypto Spring” — The Tom Lee Macro Thesis
Lee’s accompanying commentary positioned the latest update within a broader macro framework he calls “Crypto Spring.”
“Crypto Spring, in our view, has commenced and like past cycles, investor sentiment and conviction are muted and bearish even as crypto prices strengthen. We believe the potential passage, or even failure, of the CLARITY Act confirms the arrival of crypto spring.”
The reference to the CLARITY Act is significant. The U.S. Senate released its compromise text recently, with Lee noting that prediction markets on Polymarket now show “greater than 60% chance of passage in 2026, the highest probabilities in more than a month.” The bill bans stablecoin yield on reserves but permits activity-based “rewards”—a compromise Bitmine described as “largely acceptable.”
Lee’s broader Ethereum thesis rests on two structural tailwinds: Wall Street’s tokenization push (where ETH is the dominant smart-contract layer) and agentic AI systems that he argues will require “public and neutral blockchains” for autonomous economic activity. He framed ETH’s recent performance as evidence: “ETH has outperformed the S&P 500 by 1,380 basis points since the [Iran] war started and remains one of the top performing assets in the world (beside crude oil prices).”
The NYSE Uplisting and Liquidity Picture
Bitmine uplisted from NYSE American to the New York Stock Exchange effective April 9, 2026, continuing to trade under the ticker BMNR. Lee disclosed that Bitmine is now the 173rd most traded stock in the United States by 5-day average dollar volume, at approximately $625 million per day, ranking between Cheniere Energy (#172) and DoorDash (#174).
That liquidity profile is editorially notable. Among the 5,704 US-listed stocks, ranking #173 places Bitmine in the upper echelon of trading activity—well ahead of most mid-cap names and competitive with several large-caps. The high trading volume gives Bitmine flexibility to execute capital-markets activities (equity raises, share buybacks, future stock splits) without significant slippage—capacity that may matter materially as the company pushes toward the final 14% of its 5% target.
The Eightco / OpenAI Wrinkle
Tucked into the Monday statement is a detail that hasn’t drawn much coverage but is worth flagging: Bitmine’s $83 million stake in Eightco is described as offering investors “indirect exposure to OpenAI.”
Eightco has been positioning itself as an OpenAI-adjacent public equity, and Bitmine’s $83M stake makes it a meaningful holder. For BMNR shareholders, this means a small slice of their crypto-treasury exposure is also a synthetic AI-infrastructure bet—adding optionality but also complexity to the company’s pitch.
Also Read: On-Chain Data: Ethereum Foundation Holdings Could Reach Zero by 2027
