BitMine Is About to Own 5% of Ethereum, Tom Lee Reveals What Comes Next

BitMine Immersion Technologies owns 5,847,611 ether. That is 4.79% of every ether in existence, and a tighter grip on Ethereum than Michael Saylor has ever held on Bitcoin.

Chairman Tom Lee told the Bankless podcast the company could reach its 5% goal before the end of 2026. The math is harder than it looks.

BitMine Built Its Ethereum Stack in 14 Months

Saylor's firm, MicroStrategy, took six years to gather 840,447 Bitcoin. That comes to 4.19% of the coins in circulation.

BitMine passed that share of ether in 14 months. It made its first purchase on June 30, 2025, and has bought every week since. Sixty weeks, no gaps.

Lee credits a plain balance sheet. BitMine paid for the stack with common stock, not loans or convertible notes. Several rival treasuries leaned on those tools and did not survive the downturn.

Ether traded near $2,480 on Monday, up 1% on the day. It rose about 30% last week, its best week since May 2025. BitMine used the rally for its largest weekly ETH purchase since early July.

"It's about $350 million worth of ETH that we need to acquire to reach 5%... we could reach it by the end of the year," Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, speaking on Bankless.

Here is the catch. Ether supply is not fixed, and right now it is growing. The network has added 85,893 ether over the past 30 days.

Total supply now sits at 121.98 million. That is about 1.3 million higher than the figure BitMine's own disclosures use.

That gap matters because a true 5% means 6.1 million ether. BitMine is about 251,000 tokens short, worth roughly $620 million at Monday's price. Lee's $350 million estimate was made before ether's rally.

Lee rules out selling. BitMine has staked most of its ether, and those 5.07 million tokens generate about $330 million a year. That alone is roughly 12% of all staked ether on the network.

The yield covers the dividend on BMNP. That is a 9.5% preferred stock BitMine sold in June at $80, against a $100 liquidation value. Lee calls it a cheap three-year call option on ether.

The company is also turning into an Ethereum operator. Its validator arm MAVAN, short for Made in America Validator Network, launched in March.

BitMine then helped anchor three groups spun out of the Ethereum Foundation, alongside SharpLink and Ethereum co-founder Joe Lubin.

Lee ties the long-term case to tokenization and artificial intelligence rather than stablecoins. On that Wall Street adoption thesis, he named a number.