Tom Lee's Bitmine Bought the Dip, Adding Over 200K ETH to Ethereum Treasury

The largest ether (ETH) treasury company BitMine Technologies (BMNR) bought last week's dip in crypto prices, adding 202,037 tokens, $828 million at current prices, to its holdings, the firm reported on Monday. "The crypto liquidation over the past few days created a price decline in ETH, which BitMine took advantage of," Bitmine chairman Thomas Lee said in a statement. "Volatility creates deleveraging and this can cause assets to trade at substantial discounts to fundamentals, or as we say, 'substantial discount to the future' and this creates advantages for investors, at the expense of traders," he added. That purchase brought the firm's ETH holdings over 3 million, or 2.5% of the crypto's supply, halfway of the company's telegraphed goal to acquire 5% of all ETH on the market. Following Friday's crypto flash crash, freshly created addresses that "likely" belonged to Bitmine withdrew over 128,718 ETH, or $480 million worth at the time, from exchange Kraken and prime broker FalconX, blockchain sleuth Lookonchain noted on Saturday. Before that, Lookonchain also attributed another 43,843 ETH worth of withdrawals to potentially being Bitmine's. While those addresses have not been annotated as Bitmine's on blockchain intelligence platforms such as Arkham, the amount of tokens roughly line up with the company's updated holdings. ETH tumbled from $4,500 on Thursday to as low as $3,500 on late Friday as trade tensions between U.S. and China flared up, with U.S. President Trump announcing 100% increase in tariffs against Chinese goods, responding to China tightening rare earth metal export controls. ETH rebounded to $4,100 as of Monday. BMNR was up 4.3% in pre-market trading after closing Friday's session 11% lower at $52.47.