Bitmine Ethereum Treasury Swells to 5.98m Tokens on Latest Buy

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) has pushed its Ethereum treasury to 5.98 million tokens, after buying another 27,562 ETH in the week to 21 September 2026 – a purchase worth roughly $75m at the time, according to CoinDesk. Chairman Tom Lee used the update to declare that crypto’s bull market is now, in his words, “underway,” a claim reported by The Block.

The purchase takes Bitmine’s holdings to 4.9% of Ethereum’s circulating supply, putting the company 98% of the way to the 5% ownership target it has nicknamed its “Alchemy of 5%” plan, per the same Block report. Total crypto and cash holdings now stand at $17.1bn.

A habit, not a one-off

What makes this less a headline event than a running data point is the consistency behind it. Bitmine has bought ETH every single week since launching its treasury strategy on 30 June 2025, according to the company’s own disclosures. The pace has varied – it added 27,180 ETH the week before this latest purchase, taking holdings to 5,956,378 tokens, and bought a much larger 53,501 ETH at the end of August, lifting the total to 5,901,112 ETH at that point. The Bitmine Ethereum treasury has grown in fits and starts, but it has not shrunk in more than a year.

Of the 5.98 million ETH now held, 5,067,309 tokens are staked through the company’s MAVAN platform, generating projected annualised staking revenue of $357m – a yield stream that has become the company’s most important source of recurring income as its core immersion-cooling business remains small by comparison.

Lee’s bull case, and the price action behind it

Lee’s “underway” comment is not made in a vacuum. Ether (ETH) traded at $2,731.66 as of the update, up 4.54% over 24 hours and 9.66% over the preceding week, according to Binance spot data cited in the same reporting. Lee has argued that Ethereum’s third-quarter outperformance versus other macro assets – by more than 6,500 basis points (a basis point is one-hundredth of a percentage point) on a quarter-to-date basis, per The Block – is a prelude to a stronger fourth quarter, not the peak of the move.

BMNR shares closed at $27.42, up 6.08% on the day and 12.58% over the preceding 20 trading sessions, having traded in a range of $22.35 to $27.51 across that window. Daily short-sale activity – the share of trading volume attributable to short sellers, who borrow and sell stock betting the price will fall – ran between 39% and 53% of volume in the fortnight before the announcement, according to FINRA data. That range shows no obvious spike coinciding with the purchase, suggesting the rally has not been accompanied by a rush of new bearish positioning.

The accounting quirk the press release leaves out

The bullish framing sits awkwardly next to Bitmine’s statutory numbers. Under US accounting rules that took effect for crypto holders in late 2024 (ASU 2023-08), companies must mark their digital-asset holdings to market value every quarter, with the swings running straight through the income statement – unlike, say, a stake in a private company, which can sit at cost for years. For a firm holding billions of dollars in a volatile asset, that produces headline losses that have nothing to do with how the business is actually performing.

The scale of those swings is striking. Bitmine’s 10-Q filing for the quarter ended 30 November 2025 reported a net loss of $5.2bn, followed by a $3.82bn loss for the quarter ended 28 February 2026, according to SEC EDGAR filings. Those are not operating losses in any conventional sense – they reflect the accounting treatment of a treasury that has grown from a standing start to nearly 6 million ETH inside 15 months. Set against that backdrop, actual operating revenue has climbed sharply too, from $2.29m in the quarter to November 2025 to $46.5m in the quarter to May 2026, driven largely by staking income rather than the immersion-cooling operations the company was originally built around.

None of this means the fair-value losses are meaningless to investors – they will continue to appear every quarter for as long as Bitmine holds a large ETH position and ether’s price moves against it – but they explain why a company can post multi-billion-dollar GAAP losses in the same filings that describe a treasury strategy its chairman calls the leading edge of a new bull market. Rival treasury vehicle Strategy (NASDAQ: MSTR), which pioneered the same fair-value dynamic with bitcoin, has faced identical scrutiny over how to read its statutory results.

With Bitmine now within touching distance of its 5% supply target, the next data points worth watching are whether the weekly buying continues once that threshold is reached, and how the coming quarterly filing – due to reflect the current ether price swings – reads once fair-value accounting catches up with the rally Lee is describing.

This article is for information only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any asset. Markets move quickly; figures are correct as sourced at the time of writing. Always do your own research before making financial decisions.