- Bitmine reported 6,016,414 ether on 5 October, about 4.9% of circulating supply and worth roughly $15.5bn at Wednesday’s price of around $2,580.
- Chairman Tom Lee says the company will stop buying at 5%, which he estimates is another 100,000 coins away.
- He said it on stage at a conference rather than in a filing, and the company has not reached 5% yet.
Bitmine has bought ether every week since June 2025, by its own account, and now holds about 4.9% of every coin in existence. Its chairman, Tom Lee, told an audience at TOKEN2049 in Singapore that the buying stops at 5%. That is roughly 100,000 coins away.
Ether has spent the past sixteen months with one buyer that turned up regardless of what the price was doing. If that buyer stops, a steady source of demand goes with it. Stopping is not selling, though, and nothing said so far commits the company to part with a single coin.
What Bitmine actually is
A crypto treasury company does one thing: it raises money from shareholders and bond investors, buys a crypto asset with it, and holds that asset on its balance sheet. The shares become a way to own exposure to the coin through an ordinary brokerage account, which is why these companies grew so fast in the first place.
Bitmine is the ether version, and the largest of them. Its 5 October update put holdings at 6,016,414 ETH against a circulating supply of about 122.1 million, with $643m in cash and marketable securities still on hand. It bought roughly $41m of ether in the week before that update.
Why a corporate buyer isn’t an ETF
This is the part worth separating out, because the two get lumped together as “institutional demand” and they behave very differently.
An buys because investors have subscribed to it. Money comes in, the fund buys more of the asset to back the new shares; money goes out, it sells. The buying has no ceiling and no plan behind it beyond what investors do next.
A treasury company buys on a strategy set by its management, funded by capital it has to raise itself. That makes the demand steadier while it lasts, because it doesn’t flinch at a bad week, and it makes it finite, because a board can decide it has enough. The bitcoin treasury companies most readers have come across never named a stopping point. Bitmine’s chairman just has.
A ceiling the company drew itself
“We only need to get another 100,000 ETH to get to 5%,” Lee said on stage. “Now we’re going to stop.”
Two things about that. The 5% figure is a line management chose, not one any regulator imposed, so it can be redrawn by the same people who drew it. And the comment was an informal remark at a conference, captured on video and transcribed by CoinDesk, rather than a filed policy or a board-approved commitment. Nothing legally obliges Bitmine to put the chequebook away at 4.9999%.
The 100,000 ETH gap is Lee’s own estimate rather than a published figure. CoinDesk reckoned, extrapolating from the previous week’s buying, that the target was about six to seven weeks out. That is the publication’s arithmetic, not a timeline Bitmine has given.
It is also worth being precise about what was announced, because the coverage has been loose on this. Lee said the buying stops. He did not say the company would sell, and no disposal has been announced or signalled.
The part the press release doesn’t dwell on
Bitmine’s own materials describe reaching the threshold as the “Alchemy of 5%” achieved in 15 months, and Lee’s remarks pushed the same theme: “We thought this would take five years. It took us a little over a year. More importantly, we did this all in the middle of a .”
Buying through a falling market is exactly why the position looks the way it does now. The data tracker DropsTab puts Bitmine’s unrealised loss at about $4.5bn, a third-party estimate rather than an audited figure from the company, and one that reflects an average purchase price well above where ether trades today. Speed of accumulation and quality of accumulation are not the same measurement.
One more caution on cause and effect. CoinDesk’s own piece hedges that the weekly purchases “may or may not have” supported the ether price, and no one has demonstrated a causal link between the two. Ether moves for plenty of reasons that have nothing to do with a single buyer in Delaware.
What to watch
Whether the intention turns up in a filing. A spokesperson’s line or a stage remark isn’t a corporate commitment; a quarterly report or an 8-K is. If the strategy has genuinely changed, that is where it becomes binding.
After that, two numbers. Whether the holdings stop climbing once they cross 5%, and what happens to the $643m of cash that is no longer earmarked for ether. A company that stops buying still has to tell shareholders what it plans to do with the money instead, and that answer will say more about the next year than the milestone does.