BitMine Immersion Technologies said Monday its ether holdings reached 5,815,164 tokens as of Aug. 16, with total crypto and cash holdings of $11.4 billion. The figure includes 210 bitcoin, a $180 million stake in Beast Industries, a $73 million stake in Eightco Holdings and $78 million in cash and securities, according to the company’s press release, filed the same day with the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Closing in on 5% of all ether
The holdings amount to about 4.8% of all ether in existence, and BitMine says it has now reached 96% of its stated goal of owning 5% of the supply within 14 months of launching the strategy. Of the total position, 5,067,309 ETH is staked, worth $9.6 billion. The release projects $287 million in annualized staking rewards once the position is fully staked. Chairman Tom Lee, quoted elsewhere in the same release, put the projection at $250 million, a $37 million gap between two figures in the same document that BitMine has not explained.
What BitMine actually paid
The $11.4 billion figure is a mark-to-market number, and BitMine’s own filings show what it actually paid to build the position. In its 10-Q for the quarter ended May 31, the company disclosed a cost basis of $19.05 billion on 5,416,945 ETH, an average purchase price of about $3,517 per token. Ether traded at $1,893 on Aug. 16, the price BitMine itself cited in Monday’s release, roughly 46% below that average cost.
BitMine has not updated that average publicly since May 31. The company has added roughly 398,219 ETH in the eleven weeks since, at prices it has not disclosed. If those purchases came in below $3,517, which is likely given where ether has traded since, the company’s true current average cost is somewhat lower than the May figure suggests. How much lower is not known without a new disclosure.
A slower pace, and an old cost dispute
BitMine added 9,926 ETH in the week covered by Monday’s release, following a 7,391 ETH addition the week before, which Lee said was the smallest weekly purchase the company had made all year. At the same time, BitMine has shifted capital toward its own stock. The company has repurchased about 19.1 million shares since July, including roughly 3 million shares, worth $50 million to $58 million, in the most recent week.
The gap between BitMine’s stated cost and the current price is not the first time its own numbers have been questioned. Earlier this year, when BitMine’s holdings stood near 3.6 million ETH, it cited an average purchase price of about $2,840 per token. The blockchain analytics account Lookonchain estimated the true figure closer to $3,997, and BitMine did not publicly address the gap between the two. The $3,517 average disclosed months later in the May 31 filing lands between those two competing estimates.
The next filing will show the real number
BitMine’s next quarterly report will cover the period through August. It will show whether the ether purchased since May 31 pulled the company’s average cost down toward today’s price, or whether BitMine kept buying above $1,893 and pushed that average higher still.
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