Bitmine Immersion Technologies kept its weekly Ethereum buying streak intact, adding 10,452 ETH worth roughly $24 million over the past week, but the period's bigger move was a pivot toward repurchasing its own stock — a campaign the company says is now the largest equity buyback any crypto treasury firm has run.

The NYSE-listed firm said Monday in a press release that it repurchased 2.04 million of its own shares over the past week at an average price of $22.48, bringing its 2026 total to 22.9 million shares bought back for about $399.6 million. Buybacks reduce the number of shares outstanding and are typically deployed when management believes the stock trades below what each share is worth.

Chairman Tom Lee framed the buybacks as a value play, saying the company intends to repurchase stock "accretively" when management views the shares as undervalued. Repurchases are generally called accretive when they raise the value backing each remaining share.

The latest ETH purchase lifts Bitmine's holdings to 6,051,933 ETH, worth roughly $14.3 billion at a reference price of $2,356 per coin. That equates to 4.95% of Ethereum's 122.2 million token supply, leaving the firm, by its own count, 99% of the way to its goal of owning 5% of the network — a target it brands the "Alchemy of 5%."

Lee has said Bitmine is nearly finished stacking and will stop buying once it hits that threshold.

(Disclosure: Tom Lee is one of several investors in Dastan, Decrypt's parent company.)

Lee again cast recent crypto weakness as a buying opportunity rather than a warning sign, arguing the pullback stemmed from the same risk-off forces behind a broader AI selloff. He noted ETH had fallen 13% from its recent peak while U.S. semiconductor stocks dropped 20% over the same stretch, which he said was further evidence "a crypto bull market is underway."

Counting cash, other tokens and what it calls "moonshot" investments, Bitmine's total holdings stood at $15 billion as of Oct. 25. That tally includes 215 Bitcoin, $514 million in cash and marketable securities, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries and a $76 million position in Eightco Holdings.

Bitmine also runs a sizable staking operation: 5,227,037 ETH, about 86% of its holdings, are staked through its MAVAN platform, with projected annualized staking revenue of roughly $318 million. Staking lets holders earn yield for helping secure the Ethereum network, giving the firm a recurring revenue stream on top of its ETH holdings.

The company remains the world's largest Ethereum treasury and the second-largest crypto treasury overall, trailing only Michael Saylor's Strategy, the Bitcoin accumulation firm formerly known as MicroStrategy. Strategy pioneered the corporate Bitcoin treasury model in 2020 and remains the largest public corporate holder of Bitcoin — a model later adapted by a wave of Ethereum-focused treasury companies, Bitmine among them.

Strategy leaned in the same direction this week, pausing its Bitcoin buying for the first time since mid-September to spend $204.9 million buying back its STRC preferred stock, a share class that pays dividends and ranks ahead of common equity in the capital structure. The twin moves underscore how both treasury giants pivoted toward shoring up their own shares over fresh crypto purchases. For Bitmine, the finish line it set for itself is close at hand: at the stated supply figures, the firm sits roughly 58,000 ETH short of the 5% threshold at which Lee has said the buying will stop.