Bitmine Immersion Technologies will stop purchasing Ethereum once its holdings reach 5% of the token's circulating supply, chairman Tom Lee said Wednesday at the Token2049 conference in Singapore, drawing a hard line under a year of weekly accumulation that made the firm the largest corporate ETH holder.

"We thought this would take five years," Lee told the audience. "It took us a little over a year. More importantly, we did this all in the middle of a bear market. Now we're going to stop." Lee called the 5% mark Bitmine's "hard cap" and tied the limit to optimizing shareholder value.

The NYSE-listed company holds 6,016,414 ETH, approximately 4.9% of circulating supply, according to its latest corporate disclosure. Lee said the firm needs another 100,000 ETH to reach the threshold it brands the "Alchemy of 5%," a goal achieved roughly 70 weeks ahead of the five-year timeline the company originally targeted.

At last week's buying pace, the final stretch translates into six to seven more weeks of accumulation before the program winds down.

A $4.5 billion paper hole

Bitmine carries approximately $4.5 billion in unrealized losses on its Ethereum position, having accumulated much of its stack during last year's bull cycle at higher prices, according to tracking data cited alongside the disclosure. Ethereum traded near $2,570 on Wednesday and fell 5.5% on the day, outpacing declines across most major crypto assets during Asian trading hours that coincided with Lee's remarks.

The losses underline a tension central to Bitmine's strategy. The firm accelerated purchases through a year that market participants broadly characterized as a bear cycle, then arrived at its self-imposed ceiling holding a position materially below its cost basis.

How Bitmine got here

Bitmine launched its Ethereum treasury strategy in June 2025 and has bought ETH every week since, adding roughly $41 million in the most recent reporting week. That cadence provided a steady bid that several traders credited with cushioning sell pressure during choppy periods for the second-largest crypto asset.

Lee has previously indicated that Bitmine may sell Ethereum earned through staking to keep its share of supply from drifting above the 5% cap once the milestone is reached. That mechanism would convert the firm from a perpetual accumulator into a potential marginal seller at the precise moment other listed companies have begun to model similar treasury strategies.

What changes when the bid disappears

Ending weekly purchases removes one of the most reliable demand sources the Ethereum market has had over the past 15 months. For nearly a year, Bitmine functioned as a price-insensitive buyer willing to deploy cash regardless of macro conditions.

Without that bid, demand from spot exchange-traded funds, decentralized-finance users and other corporate treasuries becomes the marginal source of absorption for newly issued and unstaked ETH. The transition shifts Ethereum's near-term price formation onto buyers whose flows tie to benchmark performance, fee revenue and staking yields rather than a single fixed weekly schedule.

What to watch next

Bitmine's next earnings filing will be the first checkpoint at which management updates the market on its staking-reward distribution plan and the disposition of any cash reserves earmarked for the final weeks of ETH purchases. On-chain analysts will also be tracking the cadence of Bitmine's wallet transfers through the remainder of 2026, a real-time proxy for accumulation that has shaped trading desks' positioning since the treasury strategy launched in mid-2025.