BitMine buys the dip, makes largest ethereum purchase this year
Despite having an unrealized loss of nearly $9.7 billion, the leading ethereum treasury firm has acquired even more of the token.
BitMine Immersion Technologies announced it has acquired 126,971 tokens over the past week, the firm’s largest purchase of ethereum this year. The company’s total stockpile stands at 5.5 million, or around 4.6% of ethereum’s total supply.
“We increased our buying as we believe this pullback in ETH prices does not reflect the strengthening of Ethereum fundamentals,” BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement.
The acquisition comes after the crypto markets saw a broad downturn last week, with many tokens hitting multiyear lows.
Lee argued the sell-off in crypto was a “superficial take.” As artificial intelligence grows more capable, demand for hardened infrastructure is likely to increase alongside expectations that AI systems will expose flaws in centralized rails and weak decentralized protocols, according to Lee.
“We believe this actually strengthens the use case and product market fit for hardened and reliable decentralized blockchains like ethereum,” Lee said. “Thus, we believe ETH prices should not be coming under pressure.”
Meanwhile, last week ethereum ETFs saw more than $173 million in outflows, marking the fourth consecutive week of net redemptions, data from SoSoValue shows.
Joe Lubin, cofounder of ethereum and current CEO of software development firm Consensys, said the recent moves by the Ethereum Foundation, namely staff turnover and leadership changes, are not evidence of a crisis, but a necessary evolution, per a CoinDesk report. Lubin emphasized that “Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all,” even if “we are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments.”