BitMine Adds 12,532 ETH, Near 5% Supply Target as Tom Lee Says Stacking Is Done

BitMine Immersion Technologies bought 12,532 ETH in the week to October 11, 2026, taking its treasury to 6,028,946 ETH — 4.9% of Ethereum’s 122.1 million token supply — according to Cryptopotato. The purchase was the company’s third small weekly buy in a row, following 15,112 ETH in the week to October 4 and 17,362 ETH the week before.

Chairman Tom Lee did not frame the smaller buys as a pivot. In a video message whose transcript BitMine filed with the SEC on October 7, he said the company built its position over 15 months during a bear market and now needs “about 100,000 more ETH, and that’s about it.” He then said BitMine is done stacking while a bull market starts. Decrypt, reporting the same update, quoted Lee’s phrase “done stacking” and his prediction of “the biggest bull market we’ve ever seen,” citing tokenization, a generational wealth transfer, supply absorbed by digital asset treasury firms and AI agents using crypto wallets.

Both reports draw on the same Monday release, but they don’t emphasize the same numbers. Cryptopotato leads on the shrinking weekly purchases and the cash decline, while Decrypt frames the story around Lee’s bull-market call and fills in the balance-sheet items — the 214 BTC, the Beast Industries stake, the Eightco Holdings stake — that Cryptopotato’s piece omits. Readers comparing the two will find the same $16.2 billion total for crypto, cash and investment holdings, but only Decrypt breaks out the moonshot positions behind it.

The buyback story also only appears in the Cryptopotato report. Lee said BitMine began repurchasing its own shares on July 14, buying 21 million shares for $350 million, and completed the program on August 17. No weekly update filed since then has reported a repurchase. That silence matters for anyone tracking the preferred stock: BitMine raised money this year through BMNP, a 9.5% perpetual preferred issue sold at $80 per share on June 10. Lee put the current yield at 9.56% and the last close at $99.53.

Neither report offers a clean explanation for why the weekly ETH additions are getting smaller while Lee describes the company as finished. The most likely reading is arithmetic: at 4.9% of supply, BitMine is close enough to its target that the remaining 100,000 ETH would take a matter of weeks at recent purchase rates. The company’s own forward-looking statement note, as cited by Cryptopotato, includes a management statement that it is largely finished buying ETH — language that sits awkwardly beside the same release’s claim of weekly buying since the strategy began on June 30, 2025.

BitMine is one of the largest single holders of Ethereum, so the end of its accumulation phase removes a steady, price-insensitive buyer from the market at a moment when Lee himself is arguing supply is being absorbed by treasury firms. For readers holding ETH, the practical change is directional: BitMine’s future results lean more on staking yield and on where ETH trades than on how many tokens it can buy each week. The $400 million staking target is the number to hold the company to — at the current 84% staked, it is not there yet. The cash decline from $643 million to $612 million, unexplained in the release, is the kind of gap that tends to get asked about on the next earnings call rather than in a Monday press note.

The near-term trigger is the next weekly holdings update. If BitMine keeps buying at roughly 12,000 to 17,000 ETH per week, the 100,000 ETH gap closes within a couple of months; if the purchases stop outright, the 5% target becomes a 2027 story. Either way, the next filing that reports a share repurchase — or fails to — will clarify whether the August 17 buyback close was truly final.

Sources:CryptoPotato, Decrypt