Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies and co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, said BitMine’s move toward owning nearly 5% of Ethereum’s supply is unlikely to mark the end of its buying program. In a Bankless interview, Lee said ETH should trade above $5,000 in the next crypto bull cycle and could "easily" clear $10,000 within one to two years if Wall Street tokenization and AI-driven demand are layered on top.
The episode aired on Aug. 24, 2026 under the title BitMine Is About to Own 5% of ETH | Tom Lee, with David Hoffman as host.
The input also includes a clear conflict-of-interest disclosure. BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR), where Lee serves as chairman, is described there as the largest institutional holder of ETH globally. As of Aug. 23, it held about 5.8476 million ETH, or around 4.8% of total supply. Lee is also a personal investor in BitMine, while his Fundstrat Capital runs the GRNY ETF and Fundstrat’s core business includes paid research subscriptions. The input says Lee’s personal wealth is closely tied to ETH, BMNR shares and GRNY performance.
From zero to nearly 5% of supply in 14 months
According to the interview, BitMine announced on June 30, 2025 that it would pivot into an Ethereum treasury company, with a goal of buying 5% of ETH supply. Hoffman said at the start of the show that the two Bankless hosts had privately thought the target was unattainable. Fourteen months later, BitMine’s ETH holdings had reached about 5.82 million coins. Using the 120.7 million supply figure cited in the episode, that put the company close to 4.9% of supply.
Hoffman described BitMine as one of the few digital asset treasury, or DAT, stories that "didn’t go to the graveyard" and instead outperformed expectations.
Lee tied that result to three things. First, he said the company kept its message simple and consistent: maintain a clean capital structure and fund the strategy entirely with equity, with no debt and no convertible notes. Second, BitMine framed its ETH purchases as supportive of the Ethereum ecosystem, while setting a 5% target large enough to matter but not so large that it would become an overly concentrated force. Third, Lee said the company avoided trying to push the stock higher every week with a fresh narrative and instead told investors to view the plan over a multi-year horizon. He cited Michael Saylor’s view that companies like this should be judged over four years, not on weekly price swings.
Lee also said BitMine completed financing rounds almost every time at levels above net asset value, or NAV, defined here as the value of holdings per share. He said ETH exposure per share had increased by more than 10x from the roughly $450 level tied to the company’s initial trading period. In his telling, that amplified each early shareholder’s ETH exposure and helps explain why the stock has held above $450.
More than 60 straight weeks of ETH buying
Lee spent as much time on buying discipline as on the headline position size. He said BitMine has bought ETH every week since its pivot, for more than 60 consecutive weeks. He contrasted that with Strategy (MSTR), which he said had paused Bitcoin purchases multiple times and had even sold Bitcoin during the same period.
His explanation was straightforward: each week, the company does the single thing with the highest return on capital. Over the past five weeks, that has meant a mix of ETH purchases and share buybacks. Lee said that if ETH looks set up for a large move before year-end, BitMine becomes more tactical, continuing to accumulate ETH while also repurchasing shares because buybacks concentrate ETH exposure on a per-share basis.
Lee outlined three main funding sources
- Issuing common stock above NAV. He said this has been the main source of cash, though used selectively.
- Buying ETH at a discount. Lee said most of the ETH acquired over the past 14 months was not bought at spot through ordinary market purchases, but through structured arrangements that gave the company discounted access.
- Issuing the perpetual preferred stock BMNP. The input says BMNP launched in June with a 9.5% dividend, was oversubscribed by more than five times, was issued at $80 and was trading around $91 when the show aired.
Lee compared BMNP to a three-year at-the-money call option on ETH. As he framed it, the company pays a 9.5% annual dividend in exchange for the right to lock in more ETH at current prices. He added that buying a comparable option package in the market could cost close to 100% in option premium.
Staking income is also compounding the position. Lee said BitMine currently has more than 5 million ETH staked through its in-house Maven staking platform and partners. At an annualized staking yield of about 2.6% to 2.7%, that would generate roughly 120,000 ETH a year. He offered a simple math example: if BitMine is around 200,000 ETH short of the 5% threshold, staking alone can "auto-produce" about 120,000 ETH annually, leaving only about 80,000 ETH to buy.
What comes after 5% of supply
One of the central questions in the interview was whether the largest ETH buying machine would switch off once BitMine reaches 5% of supply.
Lee laid out two paths. The first is that 5% may not be a hard ceiling. He said that if corporations begin to treat ETH as a long-term balance sheet asset, then taking holdings above 5% would be "totally reasonable," though he said the right time to reassess that question is in 2027.
The second path is that even if BitMine stops around the 5% mark, staking rewards would keep growing the position organically. In that case, the company might sell the reward stream to manage its percentage of total supply, but not because it is under financial pressure to sell coins.
Lee’s line on that point was direct: "ETH is a yield-bearing asset. BitMine has no reason to sell any ETH because of financial pressure."
He said annualized staking income is about $300 million, while annual dividend obligations on the 9.5% preferred stock are roughly $30 million to $35 million, leaving a wide coverage cushion. He added that BitMine does not even need to convert those staking rewards into dollars or stablecoins. Rather than sell ETH, he said he would prefer to find ways to monetize the asset base, including by putting the roughly 800,000 unstaked ETH to work in ways that are useful to the ecosystem.
From treasury vehicle to Ethereum ecosystem company
Lee used that point to introduce what he called BitMine’s second transformation: moving beyond a pure ETH treasury company into an Ethereum ecosystem company.
He said Maven, the company’s staking platform, is not only managing BitMine’s own ETH but has also attracted more than $2 billion in assets from outside clients. Lee described it as a "real cash-flow business" incubated inside BitMine.
The same broader ecosystem role came up in the discussion of Ethereum Foundation restructuring. According to the interview, the Ethereum Foundation, or EF, has narrowed its scope over the past year and split some of its work into three new entities: the nonprofit EthLabs, the for-profit EthSystems and EthInstitutional. BitMine was described as the lead seed investor in all three.
Lee said Ethereum has become too large for a single organization to handle every function, just as the semiconductor industry would not rely on one trade association to do everything. Because BitMine is backed by permanent capital, with no maturing debt and no redemption pressure, he said it can give these spinout groups a three-year or longer runway so they can focus on execution rather than monthly fundraising.
He also made clear there is a business angle. BitMine wants Ethereum to capture as much of the future opportunity from tokenization and AI as possible.
Lee’s framework for what ETH is
Hoffman asked Lee one of the oldest questions in crypto: is ETH a cash-flow asset or a store of value? Lee picked the second option, but he used a different frame to explain it.
He argued that classifying equities as simple cash-flow assets misses how markets actually price them. Using the S&P 500 since 2009 as his example, Lee said total return is up about 10x, while dividends account for only 30% of that. The remaining 9.7x, in his telling, had nothing to do with cash flow. Investors buy stocks because they believe companies can allocate capital better than they can themselves; a truly pure cash-flow asset is a bond.
Lee put it this way: "If you think of the stock market as a cash-flow machine, the S&P 500 is up about 10x over the last 15 years, and dividends only contributed 30% of that. The other 9.7x had nothing to do with cash flow. The stock market is fundamentally a store of value."
That leads him to place ETH closer to equities, and also to land. Land can be rented out and generate cash flow, but over long periods its ability to appreciate is what carries it through cycles.
He also addressed the argument that institutions may use Ethereum for tokenization without needing to hold much ETH. Lee said that kind of claim tends to show up in bear markets and quickly fades once ETH enters a new uptrend. He compared it to the U.S. dollar, saying the dollar cannot be redeemed from the government for gold either, yet it remains the world’s transaction unit. Trying to explain asset prices with a single economic model, he said, often produces absurd conclusions.
A different route from Strategy and Saylor
BitMine is often compared with Michael Saylor’s Strategy, and Lee addressed that directly. He said the common-stock story at Strategy has already been very successful, but argued that Saylor’s later approach became more complex through structures tied to digital credit and volatility monetization. Lee said those innovations need a much longer time frame to judge properly, adding that the picture may not be clear until 2032.
BitMine, he said, chose a different capitalization model. The company uses the 9.5% perpetual preferred to lock in dollar costs while preserving upside for common shareholders. Lee said that if ETH climbs to $5,000 or $10,000, staking income would far exceed preferred dividends, creating substantial leverage for common equity holders. He also suggested that BitMine would likely only expand BMNP materially if it decided to push far beyond the 5% ETH ownership target. Otherwise, he said the current preferred issuance is enough.
Cycle call, AI, and the $10,000 ETH target
Lee said he believes the crypto market has already bottomed. In his estimate, roughly 95% of the process is complete on a time basis and about 90% is complete on a price basis. He summed it up this way: "Unless you’re a genius, buying here is probably cheaper than waiting for the bottom to be fully confirmed."
He agreed with Hoffman’s point that AI has absorbed much of the market’s attention and capital, but then added the idea he sees as more important: crypto is a downstream story of AI. In his words, "The more AI develops, the more important crypto becomes. Crypto is the downstream story of AI."
Lee said advances in AI should increase demand for machine-to-machine transactions, on-chain settlement and tokenized assets, which in turn would raise crypto’s importance. He added that this year’s AI trade made it hard for other assets to get attention, but that setup is starting to shift.
On price targets, Lee was explicit:
- ETH should trade above $5,000 simply because the market is entering a new crypto bull cycle.
- If Wall Street tokenization and AI-driven demand are added, ETH can "easily" move above $10,000 within one to two years.
He also offered a rough equity return scenario for BitMine shareholders. If ETH were to flip Bitcoin, he said, that would imply an ETH price of around $15,000, and BitMine’s stock could rise another 10x from current levels to about $180.
The interview’s central tension
The interview was not only about how BitMine used 14 months to prove that an Ethereum treasury strategy can be scaled without debt. It also laid out Lee’s broader framework for valuing ETH: whether it should be treated as a store of value, whether staking income can cover capital costs, and whether long-term corporate demand to hold ETH will emerge in a more durable way by 2027.
At the same time, the conflict disclosures are central to reading his comments. Lee chairs a company that holds nearly 5% of ETH supply, is personally invested in that company, and has financial exposure tied to ETH, BMNR and GRNY. The bullish path he described for Ethereum and for BitMine’s model runs in the same direction as those interests.
The input presents his $10,000 ETH case as one tied to a new bull market, Wall Street tokenization and AI-led growth in on-chain demand. Whether that path is realized is left unresolved in the source material.