Tom Lee's Bitmine Immersion Technologies is still Hoovering Ethereum: another 15,112 ETH, about $41 million, in the week to Oct 4. The vault now reads 6,016,414 ETH — 4.9% of every coin in existence, and 99% of the way to what Lee calls the "Alchemy of 5%". Tally the cash, 214 BTC and the moonshot stakes and the book comes to $17.4 billion.
▪️ Smallest weekly buy since mid-August, and the trend points down: 15,112 ETH against 17,362 the week before and 9,926 in the week to Aug 16. The whale is losing its appetite — or its ammo.
▪️ The buy is funded out of a shrinking pile: cash and marketable securities fell to $643M, from $672M a week earlier and $714M on Sept 20.
▪️ Rest of the book: 214 BTC, a $180M stake in Beast Industries and $117M in Eightco Holdings (ORBS), the OpenAI-proxy trade they pitch in every deck.
▪️ Staking: 5,067,309 ETH, 84% of the whole stack, parked on MAVAN for ~$363M projected annual revenue — and that staked number hasn't moved in nine weekly updates. Nine.
▪️ Ethereum Towers ran the staking since March; that deal ended Sept 3 with no penalty, and its affiliate American Validator now advises MAVAN and takes 1.5% of the rewards. Fees never take a week off.
▪️ Buyback: 21M BMNR shares so far in 2026, ~$558M at $26.60, under a $4B authorization — yet six weekly filings from Aug 24 to Sept 28 reported zero repurchases. Zero.
📊 Circulating ETH supply:
122.1M📊 ETH vs S&P 500, 3Q26:
+6,832 bp📊 ETH, last 3 months:
+51%📊 BMNR vs ETH, first 9 months of 2026:
-3% vs -10%Six million ETH is off the float and 84% of it is staked — that is the single biggest bid under ETH, and it is financed by printing and selling BMNR paper, not by earnings. The cadence just slipped to its smallest week since August while the cash line shrank from $714M to $643M in a month, so the only number that matters now is next Monday's filing. If the weekly buys stop, the largest ETH whale alive flips from permanent bid to permanent supply overhang — and every retail ETH long who read "institutional demand" is actually long Bitmine's balance sheet, with Tom Lee on the other side of the trade. That's the whole grift in one line: they sell paper to buy the coin you're holding, and you call it adoption.
💬 «We believe that as crypto enters a cycle we view as a bull market, what is notable is Bitmine's share price outperformance of ETH during the bear market of 2025-2026.» — Tom Lee, Bitmine chairman
🔮 6M ETH parked, 5M of it staked, cash bleeding to $643M. The Alchemy of 5% has one missing ingredient: your exit liquidity.
@mxcenglish
