BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), the Ethereum-focused digital asset treasury firm led by Wall Street strategist Thomas Lee, kept buying ether (ETH) through last week, adding 54,156 tokens worth around $170 million to its treasury, the firm announced on Monday.
BitMine now holds nearly 3.6 million ETH valued at over $11.1 billion, making it the biggest publicly traded Ethereum treasury in the world, and the second biggest crypto treasury overall behind Michael Saylor’s Strategy and its $61 billion Bitcoin stockpile.
The Ether-buying firm also holds 192 Bitcoin (worth roughly $17 million) and $607 million in cash holdings.
Just like Strategy, BitMine continues scooping up more ETH despite the battered prices. The industry’s second most valuable crypto has declined by over 15.6% in the past week, and is now 39.7% off its August 2025 record peak.
Lee Pinpoints Reason Behind Current Crypto Weakness
Despite the current downturn, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee is still calling for an ETH “supercycle”, asserting that the token has not reached a cycle peak yet.
In a Sunday post on X, Lee recalled that he first recommended Bitcoin to clients of his research firm Fundstrat back in 2017 when it was valued at about $1,000, and it had endured several price drops of up to 75% in the years since.
Nonetheless, BTC has now “100x from our first recommendation,” Lee posited. “We believe ETH is embarking on that same Supercycle.”
According to Lee, the crypto market is still attempting to recover from the historic liquidation event in October, which saw nearly $20 billion in positions annihilated in one day. The current weakness corroborates speculation that a wounded market maker may have pulled back operations after the crash.
“When a market maker has a ‘hole’ on their balance sheet, they are seeking to raise capital and are reducing their liquidity functions in the market,” he opined. “This is the equivalent of QT (quantitative tightening) for crypto, and has the effect of dampening prices. In 2022, this QT effect lasted for 6-8 weeks. And this is probably happening today.”
Lee, who was an early Bitcoin permabull, has remained super optimistic on year-end price forecasts. Earlier this month, he suggested that Bitcoin could grind up to $200,000 before year-end, with Ethereum potentially rocketing to the $7,000 threshold by the end of 2025.
Source: https://zycrypto.com/bitmine-immersion-acquires-additional-173-million-in-ether-as-tom-lee-calls-for-100x-bitcoin-esque-eth-supercycle/
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