Bitmine Posts Biggest Ethereum Buy of 2026 as Tom Lee Calls End of ‘Mini Crypto Winter’
Bitmine Immersion Technologies bought 65,341 ETH last weeK. The world’s largest publicly listed Ethereum treasury has also now announced on Monday, it is lifting its total position above 4.66 million tokens worth approximately $138 million at current prices.
The acquisition is the company’s largest in 2026 by token count and extends a three-week stretch of elevated buying: Bitmine purchased 60,999 ETH the prior week and 60,976 the week before that, against a prior average of 45,000 to 50,000 ETH per week.
“Bitmine has maintained the increased pace of ETH buys in each of the past three weeks, as our base case is ETH is in the final stages of the ‘mini-crypto winter,’” Chairman Tom Lee said.
The full position was acquired at an average cost of $2,072 per token, above the current spot price, meaning the treasury is underwater on a mark-to-market basis. DropsTab estimates the unrealised loss at approximately $7.8 billion.
Bitmine holds 3,040,515 tokens staked, locked to validate Ethereum transactions in exchange for protocol rewards, generating approximately $180 million in annualised staking revenue, with Lee projecting $272 million once the company’s MAVAN (Made in America Validator Network) infrastructure is fully deployed.
Lee’s Macro Case for the Bottom
Lee offered two supporting arguments. The first is historical pattern-matching: Bitmine advisor Tom DeMark of DeMark Analytics found Ethereum’s 2026 price trajectory correlates at 89% and 93% with the S&P 500’s behaviour during the crashes of autumn 2011 and 1987 respectively.
Those parallels suggested a bottom forming between March 8 and March 14, near the cycle low of approximately $1,740. ETH has since recovered to around $2,100. The second argument is legislative: Lee expects the CLARITY Act, which would create a federal framework for digital asset oversight by clarifying which tokens are commodities versus securities, to be signed into law by end of April, which he described as a positive catalyst for ETH specifically given its relevance to DeFi and token classification.
ETH as a War Asset
Lee also argued that Ethereum has behaved as a wartime store of value during the Iran conflict, outperforming gold and equities since hostilities began, consistent with data Luxor Technology published earlier this month showing crypto outperforming the S&P 500 by 2,450 basis points since the Iran strikes. On-chain data runs the other way.
The Ethereum Coinbase Premium Index, which measures the price spread between Coinbase and Binance as a proxy for US institutional demand, has stayed negative since early March, suggesting US buying pressure remains subdued despite the price recovery. BMNR shares rose 2.3% in pre-market trade Monday. ETH was up 3.1% over the prior 24 hours at time of writing.
