What's Next for Bitmine after 5% of ETH? | Chairman Tom Lee
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Bankless Nation. I am once again joined by Tom Lee, the chairman of the board at Bitmain, the world's largest ETH holder. Tom, welcome back to Bankless.
Thank you. Good to be back.
Tom, it's been it's been about one year and two months since Bitmain was first announced as an ETH treasury company, and, along with that, the announcement of the intention to buy 5% of the supply of Ether. I remember both Ryan at the time, Ryan and I, we were just like 5%. He's never gonna get to 5%. That's so high. And here we are fourteen months later, bit mine is almost at 4.9% of the ETH supply bought in fourteen months. So we're basically there. How did you do that in such a short amount of time? There are many graveyards in the DAT landscape, and Bitmain is not one of them. And in fact,
Not in any particular order. I would first of all start by saying I think, the investors who followed us on this journey and have stuck with us, have told us that they really appreciated, our consistent and very simple messaging. You know, we kept it very simple because we said we wanted to keep the capital structure clean and the whole endeavor was funded with equity, no debt, no convertible instruments. The second is that we wanted to make this about really helping the Ethereum ecosystem. That's why we targeted 5% because we thought that was a level that was going to be enough to hold enough
One of the most notable things to me about Bitmined is the consistency behind the ETH purchases. I I think this is true is that Bitmined has bought ETH every single week since the inception of the whole like ETH treasury strategy. Not even Michael Saylor and strategy have done that. Know, strategy has has had many weeks where they haven't bought any Bitcoin in some weeks where they've sold Bitcoin. The and so that's the I think the most astounding thing is the consistency with the cash purchases. How are you able to do that?
Yeah. It has been over sixty weeks of continuous purchases of Ethereum, And we have throttled down the velocity of our purchases partly in consult consultation with the foundation. You know, we had spoken to them. And, you know, in the midst of this transition and sort of refocus, I think it would have not made sense for us to be viewed as a centralizing entity. So I think we've marching our way slowly to 5%. We're, you know, at at just about 5,820,000, it's I think we're, like, 97% of the way there. But we've been able to do execute purchases because I think it's been prudent capital and cash
The crypto industry is watching Michael strategy, Michael Saylor post its these announcements of, like, you know, raised, you know, $100,000,000 from an ATM of of MSTR. And that's really the way that that strategy has been able to raise cash, and that's kind of people's frames of reference. But I'm curious as to how how bit mine has been simultaneously raising cash and also buying back the bit mine equity. It when our only comparable that we really have a strategy who is selling the equity in order to raise cash. So where where is the cash actually coming from?
It's several things, and I think it's disclosed in our queues as well. You know, our main source of cash is selling common equity when it trades above net asset value. Mhmm. But we have been very have been doing that sparingly, partly because part of us selfishly thinks, you know, ETH if ETH is gonna make a big move between now and year end, then we do have to be a lot more tactical. Because part of it is, of course, you wanna have stacks of ETH, but then, of course, it makes sense to even buy back stock because now yo
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