Bitmine's Ethereum Buying Spree Signals New Crypto Bull Market
Tom Lee's Bitmine Immersion Technologies, a digital asset treasury, has been buying Ethereum (ETH) aggressively, holding 6,001,302 ETH as of September 27, 2026, which is 4.9% of the total Ethereum supply. This amount is close to Lee's goal of owning 5% of the total Ethereum supply. According to Lee, a new crypto bull market started in late June, and if he's right, a rally could push Bitmine's stock back to a premium, allowing it to fund more Ethereum buying. The company's strategy is to buy and hold as much of a target cryptocurrency as its access to financing can support.
Bitmine's multiple of net asset value (mNAV) was 1.0 as of October 1, meaning it's not priced at a premium. A bull market could juice prices enough to restart the process, where the company can sell its shares to raise capital and then use the proceeds to buy more Ethereum. Ethereum was priced at $2,679 on October 1, which is 46% below its record of $4,946. Many of Bitmine's earlier purchases were made while Ethereum was approaching its high, and for it to break even on those investments, Ethereum's price would need to rise.
Despite Lee's comments about the new crypto bull market, some evidence suggests that a bull market is either approaching or already here. The total crypto sector market cap was near $2.1 trillion in July, and at the end of September, it was worth nearly $3 trillion. Ethereum is up by 55% over the last three months, and Bitcoin is up by 35%. These uptrends have been resilient in the face of bearish catalysts, and if a new bull market isn't officially here already, it's mostly because it's an arbitrary term rather than something that's empirically testable.