Main Ethereum treasury agency BitMine Immersion Applied sciences made its largest ETH-denominated buy of 2026 final week, including 126,971 ETH or round $214 million value of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The agency’s main acquisition comes amid what the agency sees as a “strengthening case” for Ethereum following the AI-assisted discovery of a vulnerability in privateness protocol Zcash. Uncertainty over whether or not the vulnerability was really exploited led to a 40% plunge in the price of Zcash’s ZEC token final week, although it has since recovered a few of these losses.
“The broad selloff in crypto, in our view, is a superficial take,” mentioned BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, in an announcement. (Disclaimer: Lee is an investor in Decrypt’s guardian firm, Dastan).
“AI techniques are going to seek out flaws in centralized monetary providers rails and weak decentralized protocols,” he mentioned. “We imagine this really strengthens the use case and product market match for hardened and dependable decentralized blockchains like Ethereum.”
Ethereum has rebounded round 4% within the final 24 hours, however has nonetheless fallen practically 15% within the final week of buying and selling, lately altering arms round $1,686.
“We imagine ETH costs shouldn’t be coming underneath strain,” Lee added.
On account of its newest buy, BitMine’s treasury has expanded to five,543,872 ETH valued round $9.3 billion. From its whole haul, round 85% is presently staked by way of its Made-in-America Validator Community (MAVAN), offering it with projected staking revenues of round $230 million yearly.
If it have been to stake its complete steadiness, it tasks it will annualize round $270 million, based on Lee.
Ethereum fell to its lowest value in over a 12 months final week, dipping to about $1,522 late Friday earlier than ticking up over the weekend. The most recent plunge has pushed BitMine even deeper into unrealized losses, with its Ethereum treasury presently about $9.7 billion underwater, per knowledge from DropsTab.
Final week, BitMine introduced plans to launch a most popular share that pays a 9.5% annual dividend, following the lead of $54 billion Bitcoin treasury big Technique. The agency upsized the providing to three.5 million shares at $80 apiece, anticipating to net about $274 million after charges to assist gasoline future ETH acquisitions and different enterprise functions.
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