Bitmine buys another $52 million worth of ETH; Tom Lee: The Ethereum price hasn’t yet reflected ETH’s strengthening momentum

Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought another $52 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) last week, bringing its holdings to 5.42 million coins. Chairman Tom Lee said on CNBC that the price of Ethereum has not yet reflected the strengthening of Ethereum’s fundamentals, and that the “crypto spring” has only just begun.
(Background: Bitmine bought 112k ETH in a single week! Tom Lee reiterates crypto’s supercycle: Wall Street tokenization and AI agents as the dual engines)
(Additional context: Ethereum drops below $2,000 for the first time this year! Futures open interest shows shorts are piling in)

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• Bitmine’s coin-accumulation rhythm
• Tom Lee: The three engines of the crypto spring
• Current status of the ETH price

The world’s largest Ethereum reserve company, Bitmine Immersion Technologies, bought another $52 million worth of Ethereum (ETH) last week, bringing its total holdings to 5.42 million coins—about 4.5% of Ethereum’s total circulating supply. It is only the final stretch away from its long-term goal of “holding 5% of ETH supply.”

In an official announcement on Monday, Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee said: “In the past week, we acquired 26,497 ETH. From our perspective, the price of ETH has not yet reflected the strengthening of Ethereum’s fundamentals, but that’s not surprising, because we are currently in the early stage of the crypto spring.”

Bitmine’s coin-accumulation rhythm

Bitmine is currently the world’s largest Ethereum reserve company. With 5.42 million ETH worth more than $10.5 billion, it had, earlier this year, consistently swept up more than 100,000 ETH every week for three straight weeks. However, earlier this month it temporarily slowed its buying pace, but last week it resumed large-scale acquisitions.

According to Bitmine’s official announcements on the X platform, this purchase raised its total ETH holdings to 5.42 million coins. In July 2025, Bitmine announced plans to build an Ethereum reserve, with a target of holding 12.06 million ETH (5% of the total 120,600 thousand supply), and it has currently reached about 90% of that progress.

Tom Lee: The three engines of the crypto spring

In a CNBC interview on Monday, Lee said that the current crypto market is not moving because the software sector has been rising, and that disappointment is understandable. But he pointed out that “this always happens when the crypto winter ends.”

He laid out three supporting points:

• AI commercialization: The evolution of AI systems requires decentralized identity verification—“and that’s what cryptocurrencies do.”
• Wall Street tokenization: “The efficiency of capital flows improves dramatically, and this will only happen on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other smart contracts.”
• AI agent economy: In the future, transactions between AI agents will require decentralized ledgers.

Lee emphasized: “Although there may be a pullback in prices in the short term, the investment logic of Bitcoin and Ethereum as future currencies has not changed.”

Current status of the ETH price

Over the past week, Ethereum fell 4.7%, moving within the $1,963 to $2,126 range, and it is currently trading around $2,000.

Notably, Bitmine’s continued buying suggests that large institutions still view the $2,000 level as an accumulation range. If Bitmine completes its 5% target before the end of 2026, it will need to buy about 6.4 million more ETH. At the current price, that is about $1.28 billion.

In the Taiwan context: starting in the second half of 2025, Taiwanese investors began paying attention to the “crypto reserve company” strategy (MicroStrategy buying BTC, Bitmine buying ETH). However, most retail investors still remain stuck in short-term thinking like “buy low and sell high.” In practice, Bitmine’s approach is building a “permanent ETH core position”—it does not sell or reduce its holdings, and instead increases its proportion through continuous buying. The equivalent version of this strategy in Taiwan’s market is: investing a fixed amount into ETFs every month and never selling. But Bitmine’s goal is even more explicit—holding 5% of the global circulating supply.