Yesterday, on January 26, Tom Lee-backed BitMine made its largest-ever Ethereum purchase, adding aggressively to its ETH holdings. Replicating Strategy’s plan, BitMine has been aggressively buying ETH over the last few months. As of late January 2026, the company is the largest holder of ETH among all public firms.
The ETH USD price reacted positively to the news. Although a technical candlestick arrangement may favor sellers in the short term, buyers are pushing on. The second most valuable coin is trading above $3,000 at press time, adding +3% in the last 24 hours.
Overall, the bounce can be seen as a positive development and a vote of confidence for ETH. With BitMine resuming their aggressive buying, it is a signal that the big boys could be warming back up to Ethereum after a long stretch of caution.
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Why Tom Lee’s BitMine Is Loading Up on Ethereum
BitMine ties closely to Tom Lee, a long-time crypto bull known for calling early trend shifts. When his firm adds ETH in size, markets pay attention. Not because one buys moves price, but because it signals confidence from investors who think in years, not days.
On January 26, they bought 40,302 ETH worth $117.1M. This was not a block buy. Instead, the purchase was executed over the week leading up to the announcement on Monday. It should be noted that this acquisition followed a recent shareholder vote on January 15, which approved an increase in authorized shares from 500M to 50Bn. Because of this approval, BitMine now has more firepower to raise capital and buy more ETH.
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BitMine provided its latest holdings update for January 26th, 2026:$12.8 billion in total crypto + "moonshots":
– 4,243,338 ETH at $2,839 (@coinbase)
– 193 Bitcoin (BTC)
– $200 mllion stake in Beast Industries @MrBeast
– $19 million stake in Eightco Holdings (NASDAQ: $ORBS)…— Bitmine (NYSE-BMNR) $ETH (@BitMNR) January 26, 2026
This matters. BitMine is positioning itself as the “MicroStrategy of Ethereum.” Trackers show that they own 4,243,338 ETH worth over $12Bn at market rates. At this level, they own over +3% of the total circulating supply of Ethereum. Still, it is worth noting that ETH’s total supply keeps increasing since it is inflationary. Presently, there are roughly 120.7M ETH as total supply. Over the years, the goal has been to raise their holdings to +5% of the total supply.
(Source: Coingecko)
This could turn out to be a genius move. Unlike Strategy, whose stash is not revenue-generating, BitMine is buying and staking ETH for an annual yield. They have already staked over 2M ETH or nearly +50% of their total stash. Chairman Lee said once their full balance is staked via their upcoming Made in America Validator Network (MAVAN), the company expects to generate over $1M per day in staking rewards.
Tom Lee's Bitmine just staked 113,280 $ETH worth $340.68M.
Bitmine has now staked 2,332,051 $ETH worth $7B. pic.twitter.com/cIvp25XU54
— Grey BTC (@greybtc) January 28, 2026
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Ethereum Building: Fusaka Then Glamsterdam
Ethereum is not just a coin. It’s the network that powers most decentralized apps, or dApps. What’s more? After shifting to a proof-of-stake system, users are free to stake ETH, helping to secure the network. As of late January 2026, nearly +30% of the total supply is locked, securing the network and rewarding stakers with around +3% APY.
(Source: Dune)
BitMine is buying as Ethereum developers actively build and improve the mainnet. Notably, developers appear to be moving away from infrequent, massive hard forks toward a twice-yearly release cadence. Following the massive Fusaka upgrade in December 2025, the focus for 2026 is on extreme scalability and privacy. They, for example, introduced PeerDAS for nodes to verify data without downloading the entire blockchain. The Blob capacity was also increased, allowing layer-2 chains like Arbitrum to handle more data, scaling them even further.
The Glamsterdam is expected in the first half of 2026, and will introduce, among others, parallel processing and a further gas limit hike from 60M to 200M. With a higher limit, Ethereum blocks will handle more data and become denser.
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