Most investors run when prices fall off a cliff. Tom Lee did the opposite.
Crypto just had one of its worst weeks of the year. His company picked that week to make its biggest ether bet of 2026.
BitMine is what people call an ether treasury company. That means its main job is holding ether, the coin that runs the Ethereum network.
It is the largest holder of its kind. Last week it bought 126,971 ether for about $214 million.
Ether had just dropped to its lowest level in over a year. It fell near $1,522 on Friday before it bounced.
Over the full week, ether was still down about 15%. It recently traded near $1,686.
Lee, BitMine's chairman, called the wider crypto selloff "a superficial take." His reason ties back to a scare in another coin.
AI tools recently helped find a flaw in Zcash, a privacy coin. The fear that someone might use that flaw sent Zcash down 40% in a week.
Zcash has since clawed back part of that drop. But the scare rattled the whole crypto market.
Lee's point is that this helps ether. If AI is going to expose weak systems, he says, money moves toward the strong ones.
Ether is the second-biggest coin after bitcoin. So a big ether bet is really a bet on crypto as a whole.
He isn't worried about the drop. "We believe ETH prices should not be coming under pressure," he said.
BitMine's pile is now huge. It holds 5.5 million ether worth about $9.3 billion.
About 85% of that is staked. Staking just means the coins are locked up to help run the network in exchange for rewards.
Most of that staking runs through its own US-based setup. It should bring in about $230 million a year.
If BitMine staked every coin, the payout could reach $270 million. So the pile is not just sitting there.
But the timing has stung. The recent drop left BitMine about $9.7 billion underwater on paper, per DropsTab.
There's real risk in this game. A treasury company lives and dies by one coin's price.
BitMine trades as BMNR. Its stock tends to swing right along with ether.
BitMine isn't only buying. It's also raising fresh money to buy more.
The company is selling a new kind of stock that pays a 9.5% yearly dividend. A dividend is the cash a stock pays out to its holders.
That follows a path Strategy blazed in bitcoin. BitMine bumped the deal up to 3.5 million shares at $80 each.
It aims to net about $274 million for more ether. Lee is down billions on paper and still loading up.
More crypto firms are copying this playbook. It's a fresh way to raise cash without selling coins.
For investors, the bet is simple. BitMine is a leveraged way to own ether, with bigger swings in both directions.
When ether rises, BitMine should rise faster. When ether falls, it falls harder.
