Tom Lee’s BitMine is performing as bad as Strategy

BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) has amassed 3% of ether’s (ETH) circulating supply, but its focus on the world’s second-largest digital asset hasn’t differentiated its returns from its dismal peers.

Indeed, like dozens of other crypto-buying treasury companies such as Michael Saylor’s Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy), BitMine has shed the vast majority of its market capitalization over the past few months.

Although BitMine owns 3,629,701 of the 120,695,639 ETH in circulation, its stock has crashed 81% in less than five months.

Like many digital asset treasuries (DATs), BitMine has lost the vast majority of its common shareholders’ money since its exuberant high a few days after becoming an Ethereum treasury.

Its chart is barely any different from dozens of other DATs like Nakamoto, Twenty One, Sixty Six Capital, Upexi, Nilam Resources, Green Minerals, Trident Digital Tech, Asset Entities, Classover Holdings, and many others that have torched at least half of their share prices since early summer.

Over the same time frame, Strategy’s common stock MSTR has declined 56%, 1.6x worse than the 21% decline in Strategy’s underlying treasury asset, bitcoin (BTC). 

Embarrassingly, BitMine’s 81% decline is far, far worse than the 10% rally in ETH over the same period.

Read more: Bitcoin treasury Nakamoto down 98% — still pays David Bailey lavishly

Not even crypto’s loudest bull could pump this Ethereum treasury

BitMine boasts Tom Lee as Chairman, a permabull who has consistently and inaccurately predicted wildly optimistic prices for BTC and ETH. He also leads a research company, Fundstrat, which has covered the crypto sector since 2017.

Prior to Lee joining the company in June, the public company had long been operating as a coolant-immersed BTC mining rig company.

It then started gobbling up ETH using various types of financial leverage, hitting a high of $161 per share amid initial optimism about the use of its public equity to acquire digital assets.

The BTC treasury company bubble popped almost as soon as it started, i.e. in May, when investors paid 23x for shares of Nakamoto versus its anticipated BTC holdings.

However, latecomers like BitMine and others were still working on their SEC filings, eking out capital raises in June and July before the market fizzled out entirely.

The underlying business model of using publicly traded stocks to crowdsource funding for large corporate treasuries of crypto has proven to be disastrous for almost every offering in 2025.

With crypto’s market cap down 15% since the start of the year and many DATs down more than half — and as low as 98% — BitMine has simply followed Strategy’s leadership in destroying shareholder value since summertime.