Opinion. BitMine Immersion Technologies said Monday it added 15,112 ETH last week, about $41 million at its $2,726 reference price. It now holds 6,016,414 ETH. That’s 4.9% of the 122.1 million supply, and the company says it’s 99% of the way to the “Alchemy of 5%” goal it set 15 months ago. The release leads with the streak: BitMine has bought ether every single week since June 30, 2025.
The streak is real. So is the slowdown. Two weeks ago the weekly buy was 27,562 ETH. Last week it fell to 17,362, the smallest since mid-August, according to Unchained. This week it’s 15,112. Back in the spring, BitMine was buying more than 100,000 ETH in a week. To be fair to Tom Lee, he told Consensus in May that the pace would ease as the company closed in on 5%. Nobody hid the ball. But “we bought again” and “we’re still the bid” aren’t the same headline, and only one of them is getting printed.
Do the math the press release doesn’t. Five percent of 122.1 million ETH is about 6.1 million. BitMine needs roughly 89,000 more, and at last week’s pace that’s about six weeks of buying. Then what? Either the biggest corporate ether buyer sets a new target, or one of the steadiest bids in this market shrinks to a maintenance trickle.
Some other numbers in the release are worth a look. Cash and marketable securities fell to $643 million from $672 million a week earlier. The staked figure, 5,067,309 ETH, matches the count in every weekly update since at least mid-August, Unchained noted. So recent buys aren’t showing up as newly staked coins. Lee also highlighted the largest-ever crypto treasury equity buyback, 21 million shares this year. Speculation, labeled: a company that spends on its own stock while its ETH buys shrink may be choosing between propping up the share price and adding to its pile. That’s a legitimate capital choice, not a scandal. It just isn’t the story the streak tells.
Strategy shows the same pattern with bitcoin. Its Monday 8-K reported 334 BTC for $28.7 million, down from 1,665 BTC the week before. That takes its stack to 848,000 BTC. In the same week, Michael Saylor said Strategy repurchased $176 million of its STRC preferred shares, about six times what it put into bitcoin. The orange chart still goes up and to the right. But more of the money is now going into managing the company’s own securities rather than buying bitcoin.
Speculation, labeled: this looks less like whales losing faith and more like whales switching modes. One is finishing a target. The other is protecting the instruments that funded its buying. Either way, the steady corporate bid that helped carry this cycle is getting smaller, while the marketing keeps sounding the same. Lee keynotes Token2049 on Wednesday, and his October Chairman’s Message is titled “Crypto bull underway.” Maybe so. But a bull market needs a buyer at the margin, and the two loudest ones are buying less.
Hardwire’s read: credit BitMine and Strategy for doing exactly what they said they’d do, in public, every week. Then watch the size, not the streak. If the next marginal buyer isn’t a treasury company, it has to be ETF flows, sovereigns or retail. Find out which before you trust the next “every week” headline.
Sources: BitMine release (Oct 5); Decrypt; BitMine release (Sep 28); Unchained; The Block; Strategy 8-K