The crypto bull market is already underway, and it started in late June — that is the message from Bitmine Immersion Technologies chairman Tom Lee, who delivered the assessment alongside the Ethereum treasury company’s latest weekly purchase of 27,562 ETH worth roughly 75 million USD.
The acquisition, disclosed in Bitmine’s weekly treasury update on Sept. 21, pushes the company’s Ethereum holdings to 5,983,940 ETH — within roughly 16,000 tokens of the six-million mark. At current prices the position is worth around 16.3 billion USD, out of 17.1 billion USD in total crypto, cash, marketable securities and other investments reported by the company.
Why Lee believes the bull market began in June
According to Lee, three forces converged at the end of the second quarter to kick off a new bull phase. The first is capital rotating out of artificial intelligence stocks and back into crypto, a shift he says accelerated after AI equities dominated the first half of the year. The second is strengthening crypto fundamentals centered around tokenization and AI applications built on public blockchains. The third is what Lee described as “the ending of the 4-year cycle” — the historical boom-and-bust rhythm that has shaped Bitcoin’s price action since its earliest days.
“We believe a crypto bull market is underway, having started in late June, driven by a multitude of factors including the rotation from AI back to crypto, strengthening crypto fundamentals centered around both tokenization and AI and lastly, the ending of the 4-year cycle,” Lee said in the update.
Ethereum’s outsized quarter as a signal
Lee pointed to Ethereum’s third-quarter performance as evidence that a bigger move may be coming. ETH has outperformed other macro assets by 6,519 basis points quarter to date, a margin he characterized as a possible precursor to a stronger advance in the final three months of 2026.
“To us, this massive outperformance of ETH in 3Q26 is viewed as a prelude to a potentially stronger up move in the 4th quarter of 2026,” Lee said.
Institutional positioning is the second leg of his argument. Lee noted that institutions remained underweight crypto through 2026, in part because AI stocks performed so strongly earlier in the year. He expects that allocation gap to narrow quickly from here.
“We expect institutions to substantially increase their exposure in the final 3 months of 2026,” Lee said. “We believe this could add meaningful upside to the gains seen since June 30.”
Exchange-traded fund flows back up that thesis. US spot Ethereum ETFs attracted 365 million USD during July, compared with 205 million USD for Bitcoin funds over the same period — a reversal of the usual pattern and another measure of institutional demand shifting toward ETH.
Bitmine closes in on 6 million ETH
Bitmine’s accumulation has not paused for a single week since the company launched its Ethereum treasury strategy in June 2025. The latest 27,562 ETH purchase, made since the Sept. 14 update, follows last week’s 27,180 ETH addition and an 82,000 ETH increase over the past three weeks overall. The company held 5,901,112 ETH at the end of August after a 53,501 ETH acquisition.
The treasury now represents more than 4.9 percent of Ethereum’s circulating supply of roughly 122.1 million ETH. Bitmine says it has completed 98 percent of its “Alchemy of 5 Percent” target, under which it plans to control five percent of the cryptocurrency’s supply. No average purchase price was disclosed for the latest acquisition.
Bitmine remains the largest public Ethereum treasury company by a wide margin. SharpLink holds approximately 888,938 ETH and The Ether Machine about 496,712 ETH, according to Strategic ETH Reserve data cited in the update. By the value of its principal digital asset holdings, Bitmine ranks second among public crypto treasury companies overall, behind only Strategy.
Staking has become the real business
The accumulation has been matched by an aggressive staking program. As of Sept. 20, Bitmine had 5,067,309 ETH staked — worth roughly 13.8 billion USD and representing about 85 percent of total holdings.
“Bitmine has staked more ETH than other entities in the world,” Lee said.
Based on a seven-day annualized staking yield of 2.62 percent, the company projects approximately 357 million USD in annual staking revenue from its current position. If the entire treasury is eventually staked through its Made in America Validator Network, known as MAVAN, and other staking partners, annual rewards could reach 421 million USD.
Staking already dominates Bitmine’s income statement. During the three months ended May 31, Ethereum staking generated 45.7 million USD of the company’s 46.5 million USD in quarterly revenue — more than 98 percent of the total.
Correlation and the road to Q4
Lee has tied Ethereum’s investment case to the expansion of tokenized financial assets and AI applications, and Fundstrat data cited by Bitmine shows an 80 percent correlation between the company’s shares and ETH. That makes Bitmine stock a leveraged proxy for the thesis he is selling.
His track record on Ethereum calls this year includes an August argument that a rotation toward ETH had begun, published as the token gained 29 percent over seven days and outperformed Bitcoin. A month later he flagged the CLARITY Act vote, renewed Korean crypto demand and the bottoming four-year cycle as catalysts heading into the final months of 2026.
For now, the market is moving in his direction. At the time of writing, Ethereum trades at 2,736.47 USD, up 4.2 percent on the day, while Bitcoin sits at 85,756 USD after a 5.7 percent gain and Solana at 116.89 USD, up 6.4 percent, according to CoinGecko data.
Whether institutions follow Lee’s script in the fourth quarter remains the open question. But with 6 million ETH nearly in hand, a staking machine generating hundreds of millions in projected annual revenue, and the strongest relative quarter of any major macro asset behind it, Bitmine has positioned itself at the center of the bull case it is promoting.
16k ETH away from 6 million. One more weekly buy and Bitmine crosses the line. Lee pinning the start in late June lines up exactly with when ETH began outperforming everything on the board.
That 6,519 basis point outperformance vs macro assets is a wild number. If institutions really are this underweight after a year of AI distraction, Q4 could get loud.
16k ETH is like half a weekly tranche at their usual pace right? crosses 6M well before october imo
The rotation out of AI stocks back into crypto is the claim people will fight about until year end. Credit where due, Lee called the 2023 bottom almost to the week.
Lee has called Q4 windows before and been early. The underweight point is real though, most allocators still treat crypto as a rounding error next to AI names.
5.98M ETH in one treasury. 16k away from six million ethereum. vitalik should send a fruit basket
the 6M number is narrative more than price. same way 2M ETH in the treasury was mostly a headline
16k eth away and they are buying 27k a week. crossing six million by tuesday basically
lee says the bull started late june because capital rotated out of ai stocks. funny how the narrative updates the exact moment ai equities cool off