Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee said the company will stop buying ether once its holdings reach 5% of the cryptocurrency's circulating supply, setting a hard end date for an accumulation streak that began in June 2025 and turned the firm into the world's largest Ethereum treasury company.

Speaking Wednesday at the TOKEN2049 conference in Singapore, Lee put a precise number on the remaining purchases. "We only need to get another 100,000 ETH to get to 5%," he said on stage. "Now we're going to stop."

The threshold is closer than it sounds. In an update published Monday, Bitmine disclosed it bought another $41 million in ETH last week, bringing total holdings to 6,016,414 ETH — roughly 4.9% of the 122.1 million tokens in circulation. At ether's Wednesday price near $2,580, the position is worth approximately $15.5 billion.

At last week's buying pace, the final 100,000 ETH would take roughly six to seven weeks to acquire, assuming the company maintains a similar rate. The Monday filing showed Bitmine held $643 million in cash and marketable securities available for further purchases — more than twice what it needs to close the gap at current prices.

Lee told the audience the firm had expected the strategy to run far longer. "We thought this would take five years," he said. "It took us a little over a year. More importantly, we did this all in the middle of a bear market."

Why does the buying stop matter for Ethereum markets?

Bitmine has been an unusually consistent source of demand. The company says it has purchased ETH every single week since launching its ether treasury strategy in June 2025, a cadence few other institutional buyers in crypto have matched. Once that program ends, the Ethereum market loses a bid that absorbed tokens steadily regardless of price conditions.

The timing is delicate. ETH fell about 5% over the 24 hours to Wednesday, hitting its weakest level since Sept. 20 and dropping nearly twice as much as bitcoin amid broad crypto market weakness. The price action is unrelated to Lee's announcement, but it underscores the softer demand backdrop the market faces as Bitmine's purchases wind down.

There is also the question of what the ceiling means for Bitmine's own balance sheet. The company bought much of its ether during last year's bull market at higher prices. According to data compiled by DropsTab, Bitmine's ETH holdings now carry roughly $4.5 billion in unrealized losses. Stopping purchases locks in that cost basis; the company's fortunes now depend on the market coming back to its entry levels rather than on continued averaging.

What happens after the 5% threshold?

The structural question is whether other treasury vehicles step in. Bitmine's model — raising capital to accumulate a single digital asset — has been replicated across the sector, but no other Ethereum-focused firm approaches its scale. A 4.9% share of circulating supply concentrated in one corporate treasury is without precedent among major cryptocurrencies, and its exit from the buy side leaves a measurable gap in weekly ETH demand.

For Ethereum itself, the change arrives as the network competes for institutional flows with newer tokenized-asset platforms. Losing its largest corporate accumulator at the margin removes one of the few verifiable, on-chain demand signals the asset had.

Based on Bitmine's stated pace, the final purchases should conclude within roughly six to seven weeks — putting the effective end of the program sometime in the first quarter of 2026, absent a change in the company's disclosed strategy.