Bitmine Buys ETH into the Storm as 5% Target Nears

While the market fled Ether's doldrums, in the week of 8 Jun, Bitmine bought 126,971 ETH – its largest weekly purchase of the year – and another 76,881 ETH the following week. By 14 Jun, the company held 5.62mn ETH, representing 4.66% of circulating supply and 93% of the target it had set itself, the "Alchemy of 5%" – a Bitmine-specific benchmark for capturing 5% of all ETH in circulation. Bitmine’s position now dwarfs most other corporate Ether holders, making it one of the largest single treasuries of ETH outside the protocol itself.

This acceleration drained the treasury from $879.6mn to $247mn in three months. On 10 Jun, Bitmine closed the BMNP offering, a 9.50% perpetual preferred stock, whose $273.8mn in net proceeds brought cash back up to $502mn. The instrument began trading on the NYSE on 15 Jun and was changing hands for around $89.75 at 13:45UTC that day, with half of its issue discount erased within minutes. In parallel, Strategy, the biggest corporate holder of Bitcoin (BTC), is running a comparable BTC model with its STRC offering, which is now in its eleventh month of trading. Both instruments share the same principle – financing the accumulation of a digital asset through a preferred perp – but their structures, maturity and market environment diverge in ways worth examining closely.

The acceleration

In mid-May, at the Consensus conference in Miami, Tom Lee, Bitmine’s chair, announced a deliberate slowdown in accumulation. The 5% target of circulating supply was in sight, and the company intended to ease off. The following week, the numbers seemed to confirm the shift: 26,497 ETH bought, well below the ~66,000 ETH weekly average observed since the start of the year.

(Source : Bitmine Immersion Technologies)

Then Ether kept falling, down to its low for the year. That’s when, in the week of 8 Jun, Bitmine sharply increased its purchase volume: 126,971 ETH, nearly five times the prior week and close to double the average of the preceding months. From Bitmine’s perspective, the logic is one of market opportunity: buying at a price well below the portfolio’s historical average cost to bring the cost basis down. The following week, the pace held at 76,881 ETH, confirming this wasn’t an isolated purchase.

This accumulation carries an accounting burden. Bitmine’s average portfolio cost basis sits well above the current price. Across 5.62mn tokens, the gap represents an unrealized loss of roughly $9.7bn, consistent with the $9.02bn in unrealized losses on digital assets already recorded in the 10-Q filing for the first half of the fiscal year. These deductions are accounting losses and would disappear with a significant ETH rebound. But they reflect the reality of a portfolio built largely at levels well above the current market.

How Bitmine funds its purchases

Revenue isn’t what funds the strategy. Over the six months ended 28 Feb, Bitmine’s revenue reached $13.3mn, 84% of it from staking ($11.2mn), a fraction of what it would take to buy even a single week’s worth of ETH at the current pace. Most of the funding comes from the continuous issuance of common shares through the ATM programme – an "at-the-market" offering that lets a company sell new shares into the market over time, typically via a broker, to raise capital gradually. $10.0bn was raised over the same period to acquire $9.54bn of ETH. As a direct consequence, the share count rose from 232mn (August 2025) to 537.6mn (April 2026), or +131% in eight months.

Bitmine’s mNAV, built on the same principle as Strategy’s (market value relative to the net value of crypto holdings), stood at roughly 1.02x on 16 Jun, after oscillating below parity in early June. mNAV – market net asset value – measures the stock’s market price relative to the value of the crypto it holds. Below one, every ATM issuance mechanically dilutes existing shareholders, as the market values the stock below the value of the ETH it represents. That’s structurally the same constraint weighing on Strategy whenever MSTR’s mNAV drops below its accretion threshold.

On 10 Jun, this dependence on share issuance gained a second leg. Bitmine closed the BMNP offering ($273.8mn in net proceeds), and four days later, cash jumped from $247mn to $502mn. The offering was sold and settled on 10 Jun, well before secondary trading began on the NYSE. These are two distinct events: institutional investors acquired the shares at $80 in the primary market, and have been able to trade them on the secondary market since 16 Jun. The preferred adds a structural financing channel to the model, all the more relevant when mNAV hovers near parity and the ATM turns marginally dilutive.

BMNP vs STRC: Does staking change the equation?

Bitmine’s pitch for BMNP is that ETH generates a native yield that BTC doesn’t. That’s true in principle. The question is how much, how reliably and on what basis. Before answering that, the characteristics of both instruments need to be laid out side-by-side.

(Source : Bitmine Immersion Technologies and Strategy Inc.)

Two structural differences stand out. The first: STRC has an active price-defence mechanism, a coupon the board can raise to pull the stock back towards par. Strategy has actually used this lever seven times in seven months, from 9.00% to 11.50%. BMNP has nothing equivalent. Its coupon is fixed for life, and the only mechanism that kicks in under stress is punitive (it penalises a missed payment), not corrective (it doesn’t defend a price). The second: BMNP funds a fixed dividend with an asset that generates real income, while STRC funds a variable dividend with an asset that structurally generates none.

On staking, the calculation method matters as much as the result. The Ether network rate stood at 2.70% on 14 Jun. Bitmine reported 2.99% on 8 Jun and then 2.79% on 15 Jun on its own MAVAN (Made In America VAlidator Network) validators – Bitmine’s proprietary institutional-grade Ether staking platform, launched in March to manage its own staked ETH and serve institutional clients. The week-to-week variability showing these are short-window readings, not a stable rate. Staking – locking crypto to help secure the network and earning yield in return – is what gives ETH this native yield.

ETH Staking Yield Trend

(Source : Bitmine Immersion Technologies)

One point needs settling before calculating any coverage ratio. MAVAN only started on 25 Mar. The most commonly cited "audited" figure ($11.2mn over the six months ending 28 Feb, or ~$22.4mn annualized) therefore covers a period entirely before MAVAN existed, on a different platform with a much smaller volume of staked ETH. The right basis for comparison is the ETH actually staked today, 4.72mn ETH (84% of the 5.62mn held), multiplied by the yield actually observed on MAVAN since its launch (2.70% to 2.99%). At the current ETH price (~$1,790), that produces a projected income of $228mn to $252mn per year.

On this basis, BMNP ($33.25mn/year in obligations) is covered 6.9x to 7.6x by staking, a range that reflects the genuine week-to-week uncertainty in the yield. This coverage isn’t guaranteed to hold. Only 84% of the treasury is staked today, and Bitmine has said it intends to migrate nearly all the rest to MAVAN, which would push coverage higher. But the network yield has been in structural decline since 2020 (from 18% to 2.70%), which would pull in the opposite direction. Staking yield does change the equation. ETH gives Bitmine a recurring cash flow that Strategy, by construction, doesn’t have on Bitcoin.

The central risk is the correlation between the model’s components. BMNP’s deferral mechanism requires Bitmine, in the event of non-payment, to raise capital within 30 days, partly through the ATM, which depends on BMNR’s share price, which depends on the price of ETH. The staking revenue that covers the dividend also depends on the price of ETH for its dollar value. The same scenario, a prolonged ETH decline, would therefore simultaneously erode the dividend’s coverage and the ability to raise the capital that would, as a last resort, pay for it. And because BMNP lacks the price-defence mechanism that STRC has, it would have no tool to limit its price from drifting further from par in that scenario.

For investors, Bitmine is a high-wire yield play: the staking income from its large ETH treasury offers a recurring cash flow that Strategy doesn’t have on Bitcoin, but the model is tightly levered to ETH’s price and to continued access to the ATM market. If ETH falls persistently, both the dividend coverage and the financing channel weaken at the same time.