Original | Odaily Planet Daily (@OdailyChina)
Author | Azuma (@azuma_eth)
Bitmine is just one step away from completing its target of holding 5% of ETH.
On November 10, the digital asset reserve company Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR) disclosed its latest holding report. In the past week, the company increased its holdings by another 9,587 ETH, bringing the total holdings to 6,070,092 ETH, valued at approximately $13.6 billion, accounting for 4.97% of the current total supply of Ethereum. According to official figures, this ratio has reached 99% of its strategic goal of “holding 5% of the total supply of ETH”.
The 5% holding target is a long-term plan proposed by Bitmine when it launched its ETH treasury strategy on June 30, 2025. Bitmine officially calls it “The Alchemy of 5%” — the reason for setting this number is that in the traditional US stock market, 5% triggers the SEC 13D mandatory disclosure threshold, representing that a single shareholder begins to have substantial voting power.
At this year's Token2049 conference in October, Bitmine's Chairman Tom Lee emphasized again that 5% will become the hard cap for Bitmine's ETH holdings; the company will not increase its ETH holdings beyond this ratio. In other words, once the final 1% purchase is completed, Bitmine's year-long ETH buying actions will be put on pause.
Net buying will inevitably decline, no one can replace Bitmine
As Bitmine approaches its holding limit, the market is also continuously looking for potential “successors” — such as hoping for SharpLink (holding about 870,000 ETH), The Ether Machine (holding about 496,000 ETH), and other second-tier Ethereum treasuries (DATs) to expand their holdings, or anticipating large inflows of spot ETF funds.
However, objectively speaking, it is unrealistic to rely on these forces to “replace” Bitmine, the reasons are simple: second-tier DATs and spot ETFs are not incremental narratives; they already exist on the table at this moment.
Over the past year, every price battle of ETH has already accounted for the combined forces of Bitmine, second-tier DAT treasuries, and ETF funds. Moreover, ETF funds have a strong procyclical attribute (chasing up when prices rise, redeeming when prices fall), while second-tier treasuries are limited by their own market cap size and mNAV discounts, making it difficult to replicate Bitmine's early ability to engage in counter-cyclical dollar-cost averaging that disregards bull and bear markets and consistently purchases weekly.
Therefore, there is no need for us to seek psychological comfort for ETH by looking for “other forces to step in.” Once Bitmine reaches the 5% cap and stops increasing its holdings, it objectively means that there will be one less continuous, rigid net buying force in the market.
The truly core question worth discussing is: what is the actual impact of the disappearance of this net buying on ETH?
Although the size of 6 million ETH is huge, the “violent buying phase” has long passed
If we only look at the total volume, 6.07 million ETH, valued at $13.6 billion, will undoubtedly have a huge impact on ETH. As the second-largest crypto asset treasury in the world, just behind Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), Bitmine has absorbed nearly 5% of the total chips in the entire network, with over 80% of those ETH locked in staked nodes. The exit of such a large buyer from the secondary market indeed sounds like a "bloodletting bearish signal."
However, if we look back at the true increment curve of Bitmine over the past 16 months, we will find a fact that is closer to the current situation — Bitmine’s “violent accumulation period” has long passed, and the closer it gets to the 5% target, the slower its accumulation speed becomes.
Combined with treasury tracking data from The Block and Bitmine's historical holding disclosures, we can intuitively see the changes in Bitmine's buying slope each quarter.
The data clearly shows that Bitmine's real “violent increases” were almost entirely concentrated in the second half of 2025 — at that time, it consumed over 4.1 million ETH in six months at an astonishing speed of 100,000 to 200,000 ETH per week.
However, entering the second half of 2026, especially since the third quarter, as holdings approach the 5% target and with BMNR's own stock price entering a discount range, the pace of its accumulation has significantly slowed. In the past two months, Bitmine’s weekly net increase in ETH has only remained in the range of 8,000 to 15,000 ETH, equating to only $20 million to $30 million per week.
For today's ETH market, where daily trading volume easily surpasses hundreds of billions of dollars and spot ETFs can easily exceed $100 million in daily net inflows/outflows, a weekly buying volume of around $20 million has had very limited actual impact on ETH prices in the past few months.
No need to panic, the market has long adapted to life without Bitmine
In summary, Bitmine is about to complete the final progress bar of the “Alchemy of 5%”, which does mean that ETH has lost a symbolic net buyer in the OTC market on paper, but the market need not fall into a panic of “buying interruptions” — because the most intense incremental buying had already receded six months ago, and the secondary market has actually adapted and digested what life is like without Bitmine's net buying during the recent months’ fluctuations.
When the last approximately 35,000 ETH gap is filled, only the weak marginal buying of about 10,000 ETH per week will disappear; what remains for Ethereum is the 6.07 million ETH that are locked in the treasury and staked nodes for the long term.
The narrative of Bitmine as a “buying engine” may soon be turning the page, but this year-and-a-half long capital locking experiment has already completed its historical mission.
Related Readings
Vitalik’s “exposure” on the destruction effect, Ethereum's value narrative shifts
Tom Lee: Vitalik positioning ETH as a value storage is a “seismic shift”
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到[email protected]，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
