Ethereum Up More Than 20% in a Week on Treasury and SEC News, but Its Largest Corporate Buyer Has Gone Quiet

Ether traded near $2,375 on Friday, up more than 20% over the past week, after the U.S. Treasury Department moved to buy back more of its own long-term debt and the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules for selling crypto tokens to the public.

The rally drew broad participation. U.S. spot ether ETFs pulled in roughly $189 million on Aug. 19 alone, their strongest single day since October and a break from weeks of outflows, led by inflows into BlackRock's and Fidelity's ether funds. Bitcoin's own ETFs posted a similarly strong Aug. 19. The funds are themselves a recent addition to the market — U.S. spot ether ETFs only began trading in July 2024, about six months after their bitcoin counterparts debuted — and their daily flow figures have since become a standard gauge of institutional demand for the token.

Treasury and SEC Policy Moves

The Treasury said on Aug. 19 that it will raise the size of its long-end buyback operations from a $2 billion cap to at least $4 billion per operation starting Sept. 9, a step the department described as supporting liquidity in the market for longer-dated bonds. The regular buyback program dates to 2024, when the Treasury resumed routine repurchases of outstanding debt for the first time in more than two decades as a way to keep older, harder-to-trade issues liquid in the secondary market.

A day earlier, the SEC proposed a rule called Regulation Crypto Assets that would let companies raise up to $75 million a year from crypto token sales under lighter disclosure requirements than a full public stock offering. The ceiling mirrors the existing Regulation A exemption for smaller issuers, and the proposal extends a broader reorientation at the agency, which over the past two years has settled or dismissed many of the crypto enforcement cases brought under its previous leadership.

BitMine Cheers the Rally While Its Own Buying Slows

The clearest public cheer for the ETF number came from someone with a direct financial stake in the outcome. Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, called the inflow figure "a good sign" in a post on X the same day.

BitMine is not a disinterested bystander. The company holds about 5.8 million ether, roughly 4.8% of the entire supply, worth close to $13.8 billion at Friday's price. That stake makes BitMine ether's largest known corporate holder and one of the year's largest marginal buyers of the token. The company was itself a small bitcoin mining operator until mid-2025, when it recast itself as an ether-buying treasury vehicle under Lee — a corporate playbook popularized in the bitcoin market by Michael Saylor's Strategy and since taken up by ether-focused firms including BitDigital and SharpLink Gaming.

Yet the company's own weekly disclosures show that buyer pulling back well before this week's rally began. In early June, BitMine bought 126,971 ether in a single week. By mid-August, its weekly purchases had fallen to a range of roughly 7,000 to 10,400 ether, where they have held for more than a month. Lee has said the company is approaching a self-set target of owning 5% of ether's total supply and has been shifting cash toward buying back its own shares instead of buying more ether.

A Rally With Two Competing Explanations

None of this makes the rally manufactured. The Treasury's buyback increase and the SEC's proposal are both real, on-the-record policy actions, and the ETF inflow figures come from independently reported fund data, not from BitMine or Lee.

But the loudest on-record voice framing this week's demand as confirmation of a turn is also the chairman of ether's largest known corporate holder. That holder's own buying, one of 2026's biggest sources of ether demand outside the ETFs, had quietly throttled itself down to its lowest sustained pace of the year at the same moment.

What happens next should show which read holds up. If ETF demand keeps building on its own, or if BitMine's purchases pick back up despite sitting close to its self-imposed cap, the rally will have found support sturdier than one large holder talking up a position he already holds. If the ETF inflows fade the way earlier rebounds have this year, the market will be left leaning on a buyer who has already said he is stepping back.