Bitmine Stakes Over 5 Million Ether, Aiming for $334 Million Annual Yield

Bitmine Immersion Technologies is betting big on Ethereum. The company now holds more than 5.95 million ETH — worth roughly $15.4 billion — and has staked over 5.06 million of those coins, targeting $334 million in annualized staking revenue from a treasury that, in total, sits around $15.8 billion.

That’s not a small number. Bitmine’s Ether stash alone equals about 4.9% of ETH’s entire circulating supply, which puts it in rare company. The firm added 27,180 ETH last week, a purchase that pushed its total holdings past the 5.95 million mark. With roughly 85% of those coins now actively staked, the company is leaning hard into the idea that crypto treasuries don’t have to just sit there. They can work. And in Ethereum’s case, staking is basically the mechanism that makes that possible — validators lock up ETH to help secure the network and collect yield in return. It’s not guaranteed income, but it’s recurring, and for a company sitting on nearly $15.8 billion in digital assets, even modest yield rates add up fast.

Staking Versus Sitting: The Bitcoin Treasury Gap

Bitmine’s approach puts it in a pretty different lane from Bitcoin treasury companies. Bitcoin doesn’t have native staking. You can hold it, you can borrow against it, but you can’t stake it to earn protocol-level yield. Bitmine’s management seems well aware of that gap — and it’s clearly part of the pitch. Ethereum’s proof-of-stake design hands companies with large holdings a real structural advantage that Bitcoin-focused firms simply can’t replicate without layering in third-party products.

For a rough comparison: the Grayscale Ethereum Staking ETF, known as ETHE, reports 84.6% of its Ether holdings as staked. That’s almost exactly in line with Bitmine’s 85% figure. Two very different vehicles, similar staking ratios. Probably not a coincidence — that range seems to be where large institutional holders land when they want yield without sacrificing too much liquidity.

Bitmine’s shares are trading just below $25. They’re up 38% over the past month, which sounds great until you see that they’re still lagging year-to-date. So the stock has had a run, but it’s not like everything is smooth. The market seems cautiously interested, not euphoric.

Strategy Pauses Bitcoin Buys, Pivots to Preferred Stock

Meanwhile, Michael Saylor’s Strategy went another week without buying Bitcoin. Two consecutive weeks now with no new BTC purchases. The company’s holdings sit unchanged at 845,050 BTC — frozen since a late-August buy when Strategy picked up 4,603 BTC for around $370 million. That was also notable because it was the firm’s first Bitcoin purchase since June. A long gap, then one buy, then silence again.

What Strategy has been doing instead: buying back its own preferred stock. From September 8 to 13, the company repurchased 1.42 million shares of its STRC preferred stock for $139.3 million. The week before that, it spent $176.3 million on similar buybacks. So in roughly two weeks, Strategy directed more than $315 million toward preferred share repurchases rather than toward Bitcoin.

Read also: Bitmine Invests $68 Million in Ethereum to Reach 5% Portfolio Target

That’s a shift worth paying attention to. Strategy built its entire brand on aggressive, relentless Bitcoin accumulation. Saylor became a kind of mascot for the “buy and hold forever” Bitcoin treasury playbook. Pausing that to focus on preferred stock repurchases is, at minimum, a tactical change. Whether it’s temporary or something bigger is unclear. No details from the company on when — or whether — Bitcoin buying resumes.

The preferred stock angle is interesting on its own. Buying back STRC shares can reduce the dividend burden on the company and support the stock’s value. It’s a shareholder-friendly move, but it’s also capital that isn’t going into BTC. For a company whose entire thesis is built on Bitcoin as a reserve asset, every dollar spent on stock buybacks is a dollar not compounding in crypto.

Both companies are navigating real pressure. Crypto markets have been volatile, yields from staking fluctuate, and the cost of carrying a massive treasury — whether in ETH or BTC — doesn’t disappear just because prices are high. Bitmine’s bet is that staking revenue gives it a buffer. Strategy’s bet seems to be that cleaning up its balance sheet and supporting preferred shareholders buys it flexibility.

And those are genuinely different philosophies. Not just different assets — different ideas about what a crypto treasury company is supposed to do with its capital when it’s not buying more coins.

Read also: Symbiosis Recovers $1.15 Million in Bitcoin After Massive 46 Billion Token Exploit

Bitmine’s 5.06 million staked ETH, generating a projected $334 million per year, is the clearest articulation yet of what an Ethereum-first treasury strategy looks like at scale.