Bitmine Immersion Technologies added more Ethereum to its balance sheet this week, purchasing an additional 9,926 ETH over the past seven days. The acquisition lifts the company's total holdings to 5.815 million ETH, a position worth close to $11 billion at current prices, according to the company's announcement.

The purchase is the latest step in a months-long accumulation effort and moves Bitmine closer to a target the company calls the "alchemy of 5%." Its holdings now represent approximately 4.8% of all Ethereum in circulation, leaving the firm just 0.2 percentage points short of its goal of owning 5% of the entire ETH supply. The campaign adapts the corporate-treasury playbook that Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, popularized when it began accumulating bitcoin in 2020, extending the model beyond the largest cryptocurrency to the second-most prominent smart-contract network.

Beyond simply holding the asset, Bitmine has also staked a substantial share of its coins. The company has staked 5,067,309 ETH, worth roughly $9.6 billion at a price of $1,893 per coin. The staked coins represent the bulk of the company's total Ethereum position. Staking commits ETH to helping validate transactions on Ethereum's proof-of-stake network in exchange for rewards, and staked coins are not immediately liquid: unstaking passes through validator queues like those reflected in the network data below.

Staking Scale and Share Buybacks

Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee — co-founder of research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and a longtime Wall Street equity strategist — addressed the scale of the company's staking operation this week, stating that Bitmine has staked more ETH than any other entity in the world. Lee added that once all of Bitmine's ETH is fully staked through MAVAN and its staking partners, the projected reward could reach $287 million a year. That estimate is based on a 2.61% seven-day yield. How actual rewards compare with that projection will be visible in the company's subsequent disclosures.

Alongside its ETH purchases, Bitmine has been actively repurchasing its own shares. The company bought back 1.7 million shares over the past week, bringing total repurchases since July 1 to more than 20.8 million shares. The buybacks are conducted under a $4 billion repurchase program that the company approved earlier this year.

Bitmine also reached a milestone outside of its ETH accumulation and buyback activity. On June 26, 2026, the company was added to the Russell 1000 Large-cap index. Inclusion in such benchmarks typically brings passive ownership, because funds that track the index must hold shares of every constituent.

Ethereum Market Signals

Ethereum's price told a different story than Bitmine's buying news. At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $1,899.70.

Bitmine's stock price moved lower over the same period. Shares dropped 1.33% over 24 hours to sit at $18.73, even as the company continued to add to its ETH holdings.

Ethereum's validator activity also shifted. Validator activity dropped to approximately 2.2 million ETH on August 17. Despite the decline, the exit queue for validators remained small, which suggests that more ETH is waiting to enter the validator set than to leave it, pointing to steady demand for staking.

Bitmine is not the only firm growing its ETH stake. Sharplink, the second-largest Ethereum treasury holder, has reached a total staking reward of 24,338 ETH. Sharplink's total Ethereum holdings now stand at 868,699 ETH, a stash worth about $1.65 billion at current prices. Bitmine's position is more than six times that size, underscoring the gap between the largest corporate ETH holder and the rest of the field as the 5% milestone nears.