Bitmine Adds 9,926 ETH, Reaches 4.8% of Supply Despite $8.4B Paper Loss

Bitmine Immersion Technologies added 9,926 ETH to its balance sheet in the week ending August 16, pushing its total Ethereum holdings to roughly 5.815 million tokens — about 4.8% of Ethereum’s 120.7 million circulating supply, according to the company’s own disclosure. Chairman Tom Lee’s firm is now 96% of the way to its long-stated “Alchemy of 5%” target, even as the position sits on an estimated $8.4 billion in unrealized losses.

Bitmine marked its ETH at $1,893 per token on August 16, down from $1,928 a week earlier. At that valuation the treasury is worth close to $11 billion, but with a cost basis skewed toward much higher prices, the paper loss on the position runs to roughly 43% of portfolio value, based on industry tracking data from DropsTab.

A buying streak that hasn’t stopped since June 2025

Bitmine has purchased ETH every single week since launching the treasury strategy on June 30, 2025, and last week’s 9,926-token buy followed a 7,391-ETH purchase the week before. Total company assets — crypto, cash and “moonshot” holdings combined — slipped to $11.4 billion from $11.6 billion week-over-week, even with fresh ETH added, underscoring how far the bear market has cut into reported net asset value.

Not all of Bitmine’s Ether sits idle. The company said it is staking more than 5 million ETH, worth an estimated $9.6 billion at current prices, generating protocol rewards projected at $287 million annually — a yield stream that offers some offset to the unrealized losses on the underlying position.

Buyback pace cools for a third straight week

Bitmine’s parallel stock-buyback program is decelerating. The company repurchased 1.7 million BMNR shares last week, the smallest weekly total since the program began on July 1 and the third consecutive weekly decline — down from a peak of 6.1 million shares in the week to July 26, followed by 4.5 million and 3 million. Bitmine has now bought back 20.8 million shares in total under a $4 billion authorization that Lee has repeatedly described as the largest ever run by a crypto digital-asset treasury company, calling the stock “undervalued” in each of the last three weekly releases.

The slowdown echoes a similar pattern in ETH purchases in July, when Bitmine cut weekly buying to 7,430 tokens from more than 30,500, a move Lee attributed at the time to capital being redirected toward the share-repurchase program instead.

Lee points to the ETH/BTC ratio

In a statement accompanying the disclosure, Lee said: “We are encouraged to see the ETH/BTC ratio at 0.02994 and rising,” tying the move to what he sees as growing demand for Ethereum tied to tokenization and agentic-AI applications. He also said he expects easing financial conditions to act as a tailwind for the broader crypto market.

Ether traded just above $1,900 on Monday, little changed on the day. For BMNR shareholders, the numbers tell a split story: Bitmine keeps closing in on its 5% supply target and its staking income keeps compounding, but the sheer size of its unrealized loss — and a cooling buyback cadence — shows how exposed the treasury remains to Ether’s prolonged price slump.

Read more: Strategy’s Cash Buffer Hits $4.8B After $334M Sale, 840,447 BTC Left Untouched

Sources

• decrypt.co
• cointelegraph.com
• coindesk.com
• cryptopotato.com