BitMine Capped Its ETH Buying at 5% of Supply — 6.02 Million Coins, 88,586 Short, and a $363 Million Staking Business

The largest corporate buyer of ether just announced it is finished buying. At Token2049 in Singapore on Wednesday, BitMine chairman Tom Lee said the company will not take its Ethereum position past 5% of total supply — a hard ceiling on a treasury that was built through 15 months of weekly purchases.

BitMine (NYSE: BMNR) held 6,016,414 ETH as of October 4, according to the company's own disclosure, after adding 15,112 ETH in the week through that date. That is 4.9% of the 122.1 million ether in existence, and it follows a record of buying every single week since the treasury strategy began. Only 88,586 ETH separate the company from its stated target — roughly $227 million at Wednesday's price near $2,560.

Lee's message at the conference was blunt: this is not a pause, it is a cap. He had previously left the door open to going past 5% depending on Ethereum's adoption, and told the Token2049 audience that door is now closed — see the Token2049 remarks here.

That's a hard cap. We're not gonna be accumulating past 5%. We're not gonna own more than 5% of Ethereum. — Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine, at Token2049 Singapore

The five numbers behind the alchemy of 5%

6,016,414 — the ether BitMine holds, the largest corporate Ethereum treasury in the world, worth about $15.4 billion at today's quote. 4.93% — its share of the live 122,113,301 ETH supply. 88,586 — the coins left before the cap binds. 5,067,309 — the portion already staked through the company's own MAVAN validator network, which is 84% of the stack and roughly 4.1% of every ether that exists. And 363 — as in $363 million, the annualized staking revenue BitMine projects from the coins it already owns.

That last number is the one that matters. The projected revenue rises to $431 million once the remainder of the position is staked, working off a 7-day yield of 2.63%. BitMine has spent 2026 as the most aggressive bid in the market; it now describes itself as a yield business sitting on capital it has already raised and coins it has already bought. Lee's own reasoning for being able to stop is that the company no longer needs to sell stock to fund purchases.

He also said staking rewards could be sold rather than compounded, precisely so that BitMine's share of supply stays under the ceiling. On paper that turns the largest accumulator in Ethereum into a small, programmatic seller of the yield it earns — a detail worth keeping in mind the next time a treasury company describes itself as pure accumulation.

From 3.58% to 4.93% in eight months

The weekly chairman's messages read like a receipt for a supply squeeze. BitMine held 4,325,738 ETH on February 8, which was 3.58% of supply. It held 5,543,872 by June 7 — 4.59%. By August 9 that was 5,805,238, or 4.8%. And on October 4 it crossed 6,016,414, or 4.9%. The company's own release puts it at 99% of the way to the alchemy of 5% in 15 months.

Add the numbers up and BitMine absorbed roughly 1,690,000 ether in eight months — about 7,100 ETH a day, every day — through a stretch in which the company's own reference price went from $1,718 in mid-June to $2,726 on October 4. Very few buyers on earth can run that pace, and none of the others are running it now.

That is why the treasury cohort is effectively one company plus a group of followers. CoinGecko's treasury tracker lists 34 entities holding a combined 8,029,768 ETH, or 6.58% of supply — and BitMine alone is about 75% of that total. The runners-up are an order of magnitude smaller: SharpLink at 868,699 ETH, The Ether Machine at 496,712, Bit Digital at 162,080, Coinbase at 150,193 and Galaxy Digital at 97,764. None of them buys 15,000 ether a week.

How the market took it

Ether fell 4.96% over 24 hours to $2,560 while bitcoin slipped 2.73% to $83,226 — a two-point underperformance against BTC on a session that was risk-off regardless. CoinDesk recorded $547 million of liquidations as oil jumped on Iranian tanker attacks and bitcoin lost the $84,000 line, while market coverage tied part of ether's slide to the BitMine headline itself.

The ratio carries the same signal with less noise. ETH/BTC is 0.0308, down 4.2% over the last seven sessions and 2.8% over 30 days — the treasury cap landing at a moment when ether was already the weaker half of the pair.

For the equity side of the trade, the premium that made these vehicles work has already gone. BitMine changes hands at roughly 0.98 times the value of the ether it holds, and the smaller names trade far underneath — Forum Markets, the former ETHZilla, sits near 0.34 times. Lee's counter-argument is outperformance: in the first nine months of 2026 ether fell 10% while BMNR lost 3%, a 731 basis-point gap the company credits to buybacks, including 21 million shares repurchased this year.

What the cap actually changes

First, the last 88,586 ether. At the current weekly pace that is about six weeks of buying, after which the most price-insensitive bid of the past year stops appearing in the tape for good — unless the company instead treats the 5% line as enough and stops today.

Second, the marginal buyer question. A treasury that accumulates 7,000 ETH a day does not get replaced by retail flow or by a staking ETF quietly rebalancing. If ether's bid is not a public company with a 5% mandate and capital markets access, then the structural demand that carried 2026 becomes a memory.

Third, the model itself. BitMine is now priced as a yield vehicle: $363 million of annualized staking revenue against a stack that buys nothing more. That works beautifully in a rising market and turns uncomfortable in a flat one, because the revenue is paid in the same asset the balance sheet is long.