BitMine Just Bought Another 9,500 ETH as Tom Lee Backs Buterin’s Ethereum Vision

BitMine’s crypto, cash, and equity holdings fell to $14.3 billion, the lowest weekly total since mid-August, the company said Monday.

Cash and marketable securities fell to $475 million, the seventh weekly drop in a row from $714 million on September 20. Besides Ether (ETH) and cash, the company held 216 Bitcoin (BTC), a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $75 million position in Eightco Holdings (ORBS).

A week earlier, BitMine’s holdings totaled $14.5 billion, most of which was ETH, which the company marked at $2,234 per token using Coinbase prices, down from $2,261.

Staking Yield Falls to 2.65%

The company bought 9,587 ETH in the week to November 8, bringing its treasury to 6,070,092 tokens, a larger purchase than the 8,573 ETH BitMine added a week earlier. It now owns 4.97% of the 122.2 million ETH in supply, against its goal of 5%.

Moving on, BitMine reported 5,227,037 ETH staked, or 86% of its treasury, a count that has not moved since BitMine’s staked ETH rose in the week to October 25. Before that rise, it sat at 5,067,309 in every weekly update from August 9 to October 18.

Chairman Tom Lee put annualized staking revenue at $309 million on the ETH staked today. He’s using a projection based on BitMine’s trailing seven-day staking yield of 2.65%. A week earlier, he cited a 3.03% yield and $358 million.

Fully staked, Lee said, the treasury would earn $359 million a year at the new yield. Last week’s release put that figure at $415 million.

BitMine’s Lee Cites Buterin’s Store-of-Value Call

Lee led his comments in the release with Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin, referencing Buterin’s statements at Devcon 8, held in Mumbai from November 3 to 6, that ETH is a store of value and is money.

“This declaration by the founder of Ethereum, in my view, is a seismic shift, clarifying how ETH will capture value in this coming supercycle of tokenization and AI,” Lee stated.

Buterin wrote that ETH’s case as a fee-burning token was never as strong as it seemed, and argued that optimizing ETH as a fee-burning token would be very hard to square with decentralization and capture resistance.