Ethereum Rises to $2,000 as Tom Lee’s BitMine Tops Up $9 Billion ETH Treasury

BitMine Immersion Technologies, the top Ethereum treasury firm by total holdings, announced Monday that it added nearly 61,000 more ETH over the last week—right as the asset reclaimed a price of $2,000 per coin after sitting below that mark for the entire weekend.

The publicly traded firm now holds 4,534,563 ETH after adding 60,976 ETH—about $123 million worth—over the last week. At a current price of $2,015 per coin, that puts BitMine’s Ethereum treasury at a value of approximately $9.14 billion. The company also holds $1.2 billion in cash, it said Monday, along with about $13.4 million worth of Bitcoin.

Ethereum is up nearly 5% over the last week, though it’s been a volatile one. The second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap jumped to a price of $2,179 on Wednesday alongside a broader crypto market rebound, but then gave up those gains and fell below the $2,000 mark as of Friday. It remained below that level until early hours Monday.

“Ethereum prices showed resilience this week, in the face of rising war concerns and surging oil prices,” said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, in a statement. “We continue to believe that crypto prices are in the late/final stages of the ‘mini-crypto winter.'”

Even with the uptick over the last week, Ethereum traders remain bearish on the coin’s short-term prospects. Traders on Myriad, a prediction market platform operated by Decrypt‘s parent company Dastan, currently see ETH’s next stop as $1,500 rather than $3,000, giving the lower mark a 67% likelihood.

BitMine Immersion Technologies is the second-largest overall cryptocurrency treasury firm behind Strategy, which pioneered the model when it began buying Bitcoin in 2020 and now holds nearly $51 billion worth of the leading digital asset.

However, both firms—and effectively all other prominent crypto treasury firms—are now deeply underwater on their holdings due to crypto prices plunging in recent months. BitMine’s unrealized loss on its ETH holdings sits near $7.8 billon, based on cost basis data and estimates from analytics website DropsTab, though it currently lacks data from the firm’s last two weeks of ETH buys.

The price of Ethereum has fallen 59% since setting a new all-time high mark of $4,946 last August. However, after months of losses, ETH is nearly even over the last 30 days per data from CoinGecko.

BitMine has staked about $6 billion worth of its ETH holdings to earn yield from the Ethereum network, and plans to fully stake all of its holdings with the upcoming launch of its own Made in American Validator Network (aka MAVAN). Once fully staked, the firm expects to earn approximately $259 million a year in yield based on current rates.

BitMine (BMNR) stock is up more than 3% as of this writing, shortly after the opening bell, trading at $19.49. The stock has fallen almost 10% over the last month, despite ETH being roughly even over the same span. Major stock indices are down early Monday as traders weigh the impact of surging oil prices following the U.S. and Israeli bombings on Iran.