Tom Lee’s BitMine Now Largest Corporate Ethereum Treasury With $2.1 Billion in ETH

BitMine Immersion Technologies’ Ethereum token holdings have reached $2.1 billion, according to a Thursday statement from the company. It is the largest corporate Ethereum treasury.

The cryptocurrency mining firm holds 566,776 ETH, the most of any treasury company, according to data available from Ethereum treasury firms. Bitmine purchased the tokens at an average price of $3,643.752 per ETH, according to its statement. 

Shares of the NYSE-traded company were changing hands at $43.20, up 9.3%, according to data from Yahoo Finance. 

“We are well on our way to achieving our goal of acquiring and staking 5% of the overall ETH supply,” Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine’s board of directors, said in a statement.

Bitmine has been aggressively pursuing that goal since pivoting its focus from Bitcoin mining in late June. It closed a $250 million initial private placement on July 8, which it used to add to its coffers with Ethereum, according to its statement. 

The firm’s unveiling of its record-smashing holdings comes as public and private companies increasingly adopt software firm Strategy’s digital-asset treasury playbook. 

Among those companies, some are embracing a corporate strategy centered on accumulating massive amounts of Ethereum. Digital gambling marketer SharpLink debuted its ETH acquisition playbook in May, adding more than $1.3 billion ETH to its balance sheet as of earlier this week. Other companies, including BitDigital, The Ether Machine and GameSquare, are also snapping up the cryptocurrency.

The rush to acquire the layer-1 tokens has helped fuel recent Ethereum price surges, which have helped turn around the altcoin’s long stretch of underperforming other blue-chip cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. 

ETH was recently trading at $3,733, up 3.7% in the past 24 hours, according to CoinGecko data. Its price has also surged 31% over the past two weeks. It sits at roughly $1,000 below its all-time high of $4,891 set in November 2021.