After BlackRock’s Ethereum nod: Tom Lee buys $118m of crypto as price dips

Ethereum’s 40% discount is winning buyers.

Bitmine purchased another $118 million of Ethereum, bringing its total holdings to $12.5 billion, the firm announced Monday.

Ethereum’s strong performance relative to Bitcoin since October “reflects investors recognising tokenisation and other use cases being developed by Wall Street are being built on Ethereum,” Bitmine chair Tom Lee said.

The digital asset treasury firm’s buying spree comes as the value of the overall cryptocurrency industry is still down over $1 trillion from its October record, despite strong macroeconomic forces that have driven assets like stocks and gold to new highs.

Ethereum has struggled to stay above $3,000 since November. Investors bought $102 million of Ethereum exchange-funds backed in January, DefiLlama data shows.

Still, Bitmine has steadily deployed over $500 million in Ethereum over the past month, in a string of nine-figure weekly hauls. It has staked nearly $6 billion in Ethereum and projects $1 million in daily staking revenue.

“Ethereum remains the most widely used by Wall Street today and most reliable blockchain with zero downtime since inception,” Lee said.

Lee has long been one of the most zealous Ethereum bulls and projects $250,000 per token.

Wall Street eyes Ethereum

To be sure, Lee is not the only Wall Street voice backing the $353 billion crypto.

Traditional financial institutions including BlackRock, JPMorgan, Morgan Stanley, and Visa — managing and processing trillions — have all cast votes of confidence for the second-largest crypto.

Last week, BlackRock chief executive Larry Fink urged financial tokenisation in his speech at the World Economic Forum panel in Davos, Switzerland.

“We would be reducing fees, we would do more democratisation,” Fink said. “[If] we have one common blockchain, we could reduce corruption,” Fink said.

BlackRock cited Ethereum as its top blockchain for tokenisation in the firm’s 2026 outlook.

Lee said that one of his key takeaways from Davos was “that Wall Street has embraced crypto and blockchain assets and sees the convergence of traditional assets and digital assets. And similarly between crypto and AI convergence.”

In December, JP Morgan selected Ethereum for its first-ever tokenised money market fund, an asset class valued at $9 trillion by the Bank of International Settlements.

Corporate treasuries and exchange-traded funds are now holding $18 billion worth of Ethereum.

Crypto market movers

• Bitcoin is up 0.2% over the past 24 hours, trading at $88,148.
• Ethereum is up 0.3% past 24 hours at $2,920.

What we’re reading

• How digital yuan’s global push lays groundwork for day when ‘dollar isn’t king’ — DL News
• Ethereum ‘blob’ increase strains network, studies find — DL News
• Ethereum and Optimism Lay the Groundwork for a Post-Quantum Future — Unchained
• Shutdown risk just hit 79% — Milk Road
• BlackRock eyes new Bitcoin ETF with premium — DL News

Lance Datskoluo is DL News’ Europe-based markets correspondent. Got a tip? Email at [email protected].