BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest company holder of Ethereum (ETH), will stop buying once it owns 5% of all ETH. Chairman Tom Lee told the Token2049 conference in Singapore on Wednesday the firm is about 100,000 ETH away.
BitMine began buying on June 30, 2025, with ETH near $2,500. After 15 months and 6 million tokens, ETH trades at $2,581.
How Close Is BitMine to the 5% Mark?
BitMine reported 6,016,414 ETH as of October 4, about 4.9% of supply. The remaining 89,000 ETH would cost about $230 million at the current ETH price.
“We only need to get another 100,000 ETH to get to 5%,” Lee stated at the Token2049 in Singapore.
Lee said ending purchases also means BitMine no longer needs to raise money to fund them. BeInCrypto reported in June that Lee had signaled the aggressive buying was ending.
How Much Did BitMine Move the ETH Price?
In August 2025, BitMine added about 1.1 million ETH, more than any other treasury company that month, according to VanEck. ETH gained 15.8% that month and peaked near $4,953.
VanEck said the stablecoin story and treasury-company buying drove that month’s $4 billion in Ethereum fund inflows.
In 2026, BitMine kept buying every week. ETH still fell below $2,000 by June, down 44% for the year at the time.
By then, BitMine’s 5.41 million ETH sat about $9 billion below what it paid.
Recent fund flows run the other way. US spot Ethereum exchange-traded funds (ETFs) lost about $408 million in six days, per SoSoValue data. That equals roughly 152,000 ETH, 10 times BitMine’s last weekly buy of 15,112.
BitMine’s own stock has already beaten ETH this year. Its 5.07 million staked ETH will still earn about $363 million a year. The next weekly holdings update should show how fast the final purchases arrive.
