Another corporate accumulator of cryptocurrency is starting to look a lot like the first.
Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), the financial company led by Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, bought 101,901 ether (ETH) worth about $234 million last week. That’s close to the regular weekly buys of Strategy (MSTR), the Michael Saylor-led bitcoin digital treasury company, which well-followed crypto trader Luke Martin marked the X.
The strategy’s normal weekly buys are about $200 million to $300 million, once big buys driven by market sell-offs in its perennial favorite stock STRC are removed. The STRC spikes — the massive breakouts that appear in mid-January, late February, late March, and most recently at $2.54 billion on April 21 — are outliers, not the baseline.
Bitmine’s purchase was its largest weekly accumulation of 2026, capping a four-month streak of escalating purchases that started at about $76 million per week in early January. It now holds more than 5 million tokens, or about 4.21% of the second largest cryptocurrency’s circulating supply.
Such structural development matters because BitMine is now the only major corporate crypto buyer keeping pace with Strategy.
Most digital asset treasuries halted or slowed accumulation through the February price drop that took bitcoin to the mid-$60,000s and ether below $1,900. The strategy itself ended a 13-week bitcoin buying streak in late March before starting again in April.
Lee’s framework for the buying pace is that ETH is in the late stages of a “mini-crypto winter” and that a bottom is forming in the equity markets. Bitmine switched to its current strategy in June 2025 and reached the 5 million ETH milestone in about 10 months.
The firm has staked about 73% of these tokens, generating about $264 million in annual earnings from dividends. Total crypto and cash holdings stood at $13.3 billion at the beginning of April.
The two firms share a book of capital market activity – Strategy through Preferred Shares and Convertible Debt, Bitmine through Equity Issuance – to buy crypto assets.
Under pressure
BitMine’s strategy came under pressure in February and early March, sitting at nearly $8 billion in unrealized losses against $16 billion in total purchases.
The company kept buying. Two months later, ether is up 22% from its February lows, and Bitmine’s pace of accumulation hasn’t just kept up, it’s accelerated.
Strategy’s April 21 purchase of $2.54 billion remains the single largest corporate crypto purchase of the year. But Bitmine’s $234 million last week is the first time the structural baselines have come within striking distance of each other.
If the pattern holds for another month, ether will have something it’s never had before: a strategy-equivalent corporate buyer that absorbs supply every week regardless of price.
