BitMine Immersion Technologies has completed an approximately $350 million repurchase of its own stock, retiring 21 million common shares in what Executive Chairman Tom Lee describes as the largest buyback ever executed by a crypto stock.

For a company best known for accumulating Ethereum, the move marks a notable shift in where its cash is going.

The buyback, by the numbers

The repurchases ran from mid-July through August 17, 2026, when the program concluded. Over that window, BitMine (NYSE: BMNR) bought back 21 million common shares for roughly $350 million.

The pace was uneven. At its peak, weekly purchases reached close to 6 million shares, and subsequent company updates continued to report additional millions in retirements.

The effort was not improvised. The purchases fall under a broader share-repurchase authorization that BitMine expanded from $1 billion to $4 billion in April 2026. A standing authorization of that size allows management to repurchase shares over an extended period instead of deploying the full amount at once. The stated rationale is straightforward: the company's leadership believes the stock trades below the value of the digital assets held on its balance sheet.

Lee's scorecard: BMNR versus ETH

Lee has framed the buyback as a defensive success. By his comparison, BMNR fell about 3% while ETH declined approximately 10% over the same period. For a company whose fortunes are closely tied to Ethereum, that gap is the point — treasury stocks typically behave like leveraged bets on their underlying asset, amplifying both rallies and selloffs.

Lee credits the repurchases as a key reason the stock did not fall harder.

The Ethereum war chest behind it

None of this replaces BitMine's core identity. The company launched its Ethereum-focused treasury strategy on June 30, 2025, and has bought ETH on a weekly basis since then. The result is a stockpile of roughly 6 million ETH — nearly 4.9% of Ethereum's total supply — making BitMine the largest corporate Ethereum treasury.

The company is not letting those tokens sit idle. About 87% of its holdings are staked through the MAVAN platform, meaning the ETH is locked up to help secure the Ethereum network in exchange for rewards. Depending on yield levels, BitMine projects annualized revenue of between $250 million and $363 million from this activity.

The preferred stock side of the story

BitMine has also raised capital from investors through preferred equity. Its BMNP shares, a 9.5% Series A perpetual preferred, have climbed roughly 24% from their $80 issue price. Perpetual preferreds combine a fixed dividend with no maturity date, placing them between debt and common equity in a company's capital structure. At current levels, BMNP yields 9.56%.

What this means for investors and rivals

For shareholders, retiring 21 million shares means each remaining share a slightly larger claim on BitMine's ETH holdings and staking income.

There are trade-offs to watch. Every dollar spent on buybacks is a dollar not spent on additional ETH, and the right balance depends on how wide the gap between share price and asset value — the premium or discount to net asset value that treasury-stock investors track — actually is. The remaining capacity under the $4 billion authorization is the figure to track: how much more BitMine chooses to deploy, and when, will indicate how strongly management believes its own claim that the stock is undervalued.