Bitmine Immersion Technologies purchased 71,179 Ethereum – worth approximately $147 million – last week, its largest single-week buy of 2026 and the fifth consecutive week of sustained crypto accumulation.
Combined with the 238,244 ETH acquired over the prior four weeks, Bitmine has now stacked roughly 309,423 ETH in just over a month – and the supply mechanics behind that pace are worth examining precisely.
Chairman Tom Lee is not being subtle about the thesis. The question the market hasn’t fully answered yet: is Bitmine absorbing sell pressure fast enough to move price – or is ETH’s 22% YTD decline signaling that even $147M weekly buys aren’t enough to flip sentiment on their own?
Key Takeaways:
- Bitmine acquired 71,179 ETH (~$147M) last week – its largest weekly purchase of 2026, bringing its five-week total to 309,423 ETH.
- Total holdings now sit near 4.73 million ETH (~3.92% of supply), valued at approximately $10.5 billion – exceeding Bitmine’s $9.34 billion market cap.
- 3.14 million ETH are currently staked, generating $180M in annualized yield at a 2.81% seven-day rate – with $272M projected once MAVAN staking launches.
- Tom Lee ties the crypto winter’s end directly to oil market stabilization – citing crypto’s inverse correlation to oil as currently at its highest level in a year.
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Five Weeks of Crypto Buying, What 309,000 Ethereum Actually Does to Liquid Supply
Bitmine confirmed the purchase via an official post on X, with on-chain data corroborating the 71,179 ETH acquisition – up from 65,341 ETH the prior week on March 23, marking a clear escalation in weekly pace. Of its total ~4.73 million ETH holdings, 3.14 million are already staked, effectively removing them from liquid circulation entirely.
That’s a meaningful supply withdrawal at a moment when institutional staking demand is accelerating across the board.
Lee framed the strategy explicitly on Monday: “Bitmine has maintained the increased pace of ETH buys in each of the past four weeks, as our base case is ETH is in the final stages of the ‘mini-crypto winter.’” He added that the macro unlock condition is specific – “the crypto winter likely ends when the upside risk to oil prices peaks,” pointing to the highest crypto-oil inverse correlation in the past year as the key read.
StrategicEthReserve currently tracks 67 large ETH treasury holders. Bitmine leads by a wide margin – SharpLink Gaming sits second with 863,000 ETH, Ether Machine third with 496,000.
The gap between first and second place alone is more than 3.8 million tokens. That concentration matters: Bitmine is absorbing a structurally significant portion of available sell-side flow, but broader institutional outflows elsewhere are still creating headwinds that individual corporate treasury buying struggles to fully offset.
Ethereum Price Prediction: Can Bitmine’s Accumulation Force a Repricing Above $2,200?
ETH is currently trading near $2,065, down roughly 22% year-to-date despite Bitmine’s aggressive weekly purchases.
Key resistance sits at $2,200 – a level ETH has failed to reclaim since the October crash – while near-term support holds around $1,980, a zone that has absorbed two recent liquidation events. RSI on the daily chart is hovering near 42, not yet oversold but showing no clear momentum reversal signal.
This whole move hinges on oil and whether that pressure finally cools off, because if it does, that is the kind of macro relief that can unlock risk assets, and with Bitmine steadily buying large chunks of ETH every week, supply keeps getting tighter in the background, which gives price a real shot at reclaiming $2,200 and pushing toward $2,500 if momentum follows.
Right now though it still feels stuck in the middle, with tensions and oil volatility hanging around, keeping ETH boxed between roughly $1,980 and $2,150 while Bitmine keeps accumulating but cannot fully break price out on its own, so you get a grind instead of a clean trend.
The risk is that this demand story fades before it fully plays out, because if inflows stay weak and Bitmine slows down as it gets closer to its supply target, that removes the main buying pressure, and without it, ETH can slip back toward $1,800 where the next real support sits.
The supply mechanics are shifting materially – but ETH’s price hasn’t priced in five weeks of $100M+ weekly buying. That disconnect is either a lagging signal or a warning that demand needs a macro catalyst, not just a corporate treasury, to resolve.
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