Tom Lee reckons investors are overlooking one of the most important trends inside the crypto treasury craze: the aggressiveness with which a handful of companies are buying up Ethereum.
But it’s not just the asset — “it’s the velocity at which we’re accumulating it,” he said.
Michael Saylor kicked off a trend that is only getting bigger — buying cryptocurrencies and holding them on a company’s balance sheet. Strategy, the firm he leads, now holds more than 3% of Bitcoin’s total supply, and shareholders have enjoyed a tenfold price appreciation in the company’s stock price since it started buying the cryptocurrency in August 2020.
Now, companies are looking down the risk curve into other cryptocurrencies, like Ethereum.
Lee recently became chairman of BitMine, a little-known Bitcoin miner that has quickly become the largest public holder of Ethereum. In just two weeks, the firm has accumulated over $2 billion of Ether.
But the firm is just getting started. According to a July investor deck titled The Alchemy of 5%, BitMine plans on acquiring up to 5% of the entire supply of Ether.
But Lee did not reply to questions about supposed risk presented by Ethereum treasury companies, instead cutting the interview short.
Concerns abound. Famed short seller Jim Chanos has called one of Strategy’s financial maneuvers “complete financial gibberish“ and shorted the company’s stock.
Coinbase analysts warned treasury companies pose “systemic risk” to the crypto market. Macro analyst Noelle Acheson has called the trend “alarming.”
Bigger than Bitcoin
For Lee, Ethereum presents a bigger opportunity than Bitcoin.
Why? Stablecoins.
Indeed, stablecoins have become a killer use-case for crypto, amassing a staggering market valuation of $272 billion. And now that US President Donald Trump signed into law the Genius Act, which opens the floodgates for banks to issue their own stablecoins, the pie could get even bigger.
“Stablecoins are the ‘ChatGPT’ of crypto,” Lee said. “And Ethereum is the backbone. It’s legally recognised, and has zero downtime.”
Mimicking Strategy
Popularised by Strategy’s Bitcoin-per-share model, BitMine is rolling out its own “ETH per share.”
As of July 27, BitMine reported about 600,000 Ether worth around $2.2 billion, along with 192 Bitcoin and over $400 million in cash. With 118 million fully diluted shares, their net asset value per share comes in around $23—up from $4 less than a month earlier.
The company plans to grow that figure through market activity, reinvested cash flow, and — ideally — a rising price of Ether.
Unlike Bitcoin treasury plays, however, BitMine’s thesis doesn’t rely on price alone.
By staking its Ether, BitMine expects to generate $100 million in net income annually, making it part treasury play, part infrastructure business. The company hasn’t disclosed when it will start staking, nor how much it will allocate to staking.
Transforming capital markets
“MicroStrategy transformed capital markets,” Lee said, using a former energy giant as an example.
ExxonMobil had the largest market capitalisation for long stretches of time between the 1990s and 2010s, often trading places with Apple and other tech giants.
Its valuation, however, wasn’t just based on quarterly earnings — it was underpinned by its massive reserves of untapped oil and gas, which the market treated as future revenue.
According to Lee, Exxon was valued for the resources it controlled, a logic, he said, that now applies to crypto treasury companies.
Strategy, for instance, posted a $10 billion profit in the second quarter, propped up mostly by its Bitcoin holdings.
“It’s a new world: companies valued purely on their crypto holdings.”
