Bitmine’s Tom Lee calls ether ‘the wartime store of value’ as holdings hit 4.87 million tokens

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) now holds 4.87 million ether worth $10.7 billion and is 81% of the way to its target of owning 5% of the entire $ETH supply, according to a Monday release that also included chairman Tom Lee calling ether “the wartime store of value.”

BMNR shares are lower by 2.25% premarket alongside ether’s weekend decline to $2,199. The stock is lower by 32% year-to-date.

Lee pointed to $ETH‘s 17.4% gain since the Iran war began seven weeks ago, outperforming the S&P 500 by 1,830 basis points and gold by 2,743 basis points.

“We believe $ETH beating gold by 2,743 basis points demonstrates $ETH is the wartime store of value,” Lee said.

The company bought 71,524 $ETH last week, maintaining its elevated purchase pace for the fourth consecutive week and matching the highest rate of accumulation since late December 2025. Lee said Bitmine’s “base case is $ETH is in the final stages of the mini-crypto winter.”

Staking has become a significant revenue line. Bitmine has 3,334,637 $ETH staked, representing 68% of its holdings and $7.4 billion in value, generating $212 million in annualized staking revenue at a 7-day yield of 2.89%.

Total holdings, including cash and what the company calls “moonshots” stand at $11.8 billion. That includes $719 million in cash, a $200 million stake in Beast Industries, and an $85 million position in Eightco Holdings, which Bitmine described as “one of the only publicly listed equities in the world to give investors direct exposure to OpenAI.”

The company uplisted to the New York Stock Exchange from NYSE American on April 9, trading under BMNR with an average daily dollar volume of $747 million, ranking it 117th among all U.S.-listed stocks. The institutional investor base includes ARK’s Cathie Wood, Founders Fund, Pantera, Kraken, Galaxy Digital, and Lee personally.

Lee cited “Wall Street tokenizing on the blockchain” and “agentic AI systems increasingly needing public and neutral blockchains” as dual tailwinds for Ethereum, framing the asset as a play on both institutional adoption and AI infrastructure rather than purely a DeFi token.

Bitmine ranks as the largest corporate ether treasury in the world and the second-largest crypto treasury overall behind Strategy’s 766,970 BTC.