BitMine Shifts $250 Million to Ethereum, Appoints Tom Lee as Chairman

BitMine Immersion Technologies, a publicly listed Bitcoin miner, has announced a significant shift in its treasury strategy by adopting Ethereum's native token, ether, as its primary treasury asset. The company priced a $250 million private placement of 55,555,556 new shares at $4.50 each on 30 June and appointed Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee as chairman. The proceeds from this placement will be used to acquire and stake ether, mirroring the strategy employed by Michael Saylor at MicroStrategy with Bitcoin.

Tom Lee, in an interview on CNBC’s Squawk Box, highlighted the strategic importance of Ethereum in the context of the explosive growth of stablecoins. He noted that stablecoins, which are increasingly adopted by consumers, businesses, banks, and even Visa, settle on Ethereum. This makes a treasury heavy in ETH strategically indispensable. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake design means that large holders who validate blocks secure the fidelity of stablecoins, a critical function as stablecoins continue to grow.

Lee also tied the long-term upside of Ethereum to the macro numbers cited by the US Treasury. Stablecoins currently hover around $250 billion, but Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently suggested this figure could hit $2 trillion—a potential ten-fold expansion. This growth would insure dollar dominance and directly translate into rising transaction fees for the Ethereum network, leading to higher staking rewards for BitMine’s planned validator clusters.

The private-placement syndicate includes a roster of prominent investors from both traditional finance and crypto, including MOZAYYX, Founders Fund, Pantera, FalconX, Republic Digital, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, Digital Currency Group, Diametric Capital, and Occam Crest. The closing of the deal is expected on or about 3 July, subject to NYSE American approval. BitMine will immediately deploy the ETH position into staking, giving the miner a yield-bearing balance-sheet asset while reinforcing Ethereum’s security budget.

For investors, the comparison with MicroStrategy is unavoidable but imperfect. Saylor’s company amassed bitcoin under a proof-of-work regime that offers no native yield, while BitMine’s ether can generate income through both staking rewards and potential capital-markets transactions collateralized by those staked coins. Both strategies share a central bet: that a scarce digital asset sitting at the core of global finance will appreciate faster than cash alternatives on a corporate balance sheet.

From a market-structure vantage, the new treasury model could translate into meaningful price torque for Ether if it scales. MicroStrategy’s serial purchases have now absorbed nearly 600,000 BTC—around 2.8 percent of the 21 million-coin cap—and coincided with Bitcoin’s ascent from roughly $11,000 in August 2020 to more than $107,000 today, a near-ten-fold move. BitMine’s opening salvo—$250 million, or about 100,000 ETH at current prices—represents barely 0.08 percent of Ethereum’s 122 million-coin supply, yet roughly 28 percent of that supply is already locked in staking contracts while net issuance has turned negative post-EIP-1559, shrinking the freely tradable float. If even a handful of additional balance sheets emulate this “ETH-as-reserve” playbook, the resulting demand shock could replicate the supply-squeeze dynamics that propelled Bitcoin into six-figure territory.