Bitmine Will Stop Buying ETH After Reaching 5% Threshold
Bitmine still needs about 100,000 ETH to reach the threshold. After that, the company will stop buying more, following a rapid buildup of one of the largest Ethereum treasuries.
Key Takeaways
- Bitmine will stop buying Ether once the company owns 5% of the circulating supply.
- Chairman Tom Lee said Bitmine still needs about 100,000 ETH to reach that threshold.
- Bitmine now owns about 4.9% of all 122.1 million ETH in circulation.
Bitmine will soon stop buying Ether once the company has 5% of the circulating supply. That puts a clear limit on a buying spree that quickly turned Bitmine into one of the world's largest Ethereum treasuries.
Bitmine Puts the Brakes on Buying
Chairman Tom Lee said on Wednesday at TOKEN2049 in Singapore that the company still needs about 100,000 ETH to reach that threshold. After that, he said, Bitmine will stop buying more. At the current price of around $2,580 (€2,290), the current stack of 6,016,414 ETH is worth about $15.5 billion (€13.8 billion).
Bitmine said on Monday that it bought another $41 million (€36.4 million) worth of ETH last week. That brings the company to about 4.9% of the 122.1 million tokens in circulation. According to the latest update, Bitmine also had $643 million (€571 million) in cash and marketable securities available for additional purchases.
Pressure on the Market
Bitmine's buying stood out because the company had been buying ETH every week since launching its Ethereum treasury in June 2025. That happened during a period when the available supply on the market kept tightening, which can make ETH trading less liquid. Thinner liquidity in Ethereum trading also shows how sensitive the market is to big buyers like Bitmine.
Lee said on stage that the company thought it would need five years to build this position, but it took just over a year. He also stressed that this happened in a bear market. At the same time, the position shows how big the risk is of such a concentrated ETH bet: according to DropsTab data, Bitmine is sitting on about $4.5 billion (€4 billion) in unrealized losses.
Why This Matters
For European crypto followers, this matters because Bitmine is one of the clearest examples of a listed company actively putting Ether on its balance sheet. If such a large buyer stops accumulating, that changes the demand side of the market, even if that alone does not say anything about the price direction. It mainly shows how much treasury strategies now matter for liquidity around Ethereum.
