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BitMine buys the dip, makes largest ethereum purchase this year

Despite having an unrealized loss of nearly $9.7 billion, the leading ethereum treasury firm has acquired even more of the token.

BitMine Immersion Technologies announced it has acquired 126,971 tokens over the past week, the firms largest purchase of ethereum this year. The companys total stockpile stands at 5.5 million, or around 4.6% of ethereums total supply.

We increased our buying as we believe this pullback in ETH prices does not reflect the strengthening of Ethereum fundamentals, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee said in a statement.

The acquisition comes after the crypto markets saw a broad downturn last week, with many tokens hitting multiyear lows.

Lee argued the sell-off in crypto was a superficial take. As artificial intelligence grows more capable, demand for hardened infrastructure is likely to increase alongside expectations that AI systems will expose flaws in centralized rails and weak decentralized protocols, according to Lee.

We believe this actually strengthens the use case and product market fit for hardened and reliable decentralized blockchains like ethereum, Lee said. “Thus, we believe ETH prices should not be coming under pressure.

Meanwhile, last week ethereum ETFs saw more than $173 million in outflows, marking the fourth consecutive week of net redemptions, data from SoSoValue shows.

Joe Lubin, cofounder of ethereum and current CEO of software development firm Consensys, said the recent moves by the Ethereum Foundation, namely staff turnover and leadership changes, are not evidence of a crisis, but a necessary evolution, per a CoinDesk report. Lubin emphasized that Ethereum is not on the decline, not at all,” even if “we are not front and center right now in terms of capital inflows, investments.”

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Hyperliquid reclaims all-time high

HYPE, the native token powering perpetuals exchange Hyperliquid and its underlying blockchain, rebounded to reclaim its all-time high previously set at the start of the month.

Treasury firms Hyperliquid Strategies and Hyperion DeFi have also rallied as the token increased double digits in the last 24 hours to trade as high as $76.70, rising past its record price set nearly two weeks ago, according to CoinGecko. In the interim between all-time highs, HYPE pulled back to around $53.

The token has several tailwinds, the first coming from ETF flows. Since their inception in May, HYPE ETFs have yet to record negative weekly outflows, posting a cumulative total net inflow of $171.8 million, per SoSoValue.

The second comes from Hyperliquid spending basically everything it earns in fees to buy HYPE, a mechanism embedded into the protocol’s codebase.

The venue’s buyback funding mechanism is set to add a new source of yield. Validators of the network activated “AQAv2,” which means stablecoin deployers will share about 90% of reserve yield revenue on their supply within the protocol.

Around $6.1 billion of Circle’s USDC resides in Hyperliquid, per DefiLlama. Accrual begins on August 26 and the first payment is made on October 3, the network announced in its Discord channel last week.

A substantial amount of capital is riding on different positions of HYPE. In total, a move down to under $53 would result in the liquidation nearly 1.8 million HYPE worth of leveraged long positions on the on-chain perps venue, or $131.7 million, data from CoinGlass shows. For the upside, a climb above $100 results in the liquidation of more than 3 million worth of leveraged HYPE short positions, or $221.5 million.

HYPE’s rebound to all-time high comes after Michael Selig, chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, defended his agency’s decision to approve regulated perpetuals, or futures contracts without expiration dates, CNBC reported on Monday.

Last month, the CFTC approved bitcoin perpetual futures trading in the US through regulated prediction markets firm Kalshi and an affiliate of centralized exchange Coinbase.

“Perps are highly likely to become lightly regulated and thus approved in the US,” said David Pakman, head of venture investments at CoinFund.

“We expect to see perps for many different types of assets, from commodities to equities,” Pakman told Sherwood News.

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Crypto market snaps back as sentiment lifts, with altcoins from ethereum to XRP soaring

The market capitalization of the crypto industry has jumped around $83.2 billion in the last 24 hours, with privacy-focused token Zcash and worldcoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network backed by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, leading market gains, jumping over 22%.

But the last 24 hours have been good across the board:

Investors have been eager to see some positive signs around the Iranian conflict ending, coupled with hopeful outlooks around the CLARITY act, both breathing some life into assets, Kairos Research cofounder Ian Unsworth told Sherwood News.

Simon Shockey, a crypto strategist at crypto wallet infrastructure firm Privy, said the upswing stems from several things converging. He pointed to how alt markets broadly were very oversold following the bug found in Zcash that shook confidence.

Friday, Zcash founder Zooko Wilcox said Anthropic didn’t find any more serious bugs with the Zcash protocol after Shielded Labs requested the AI firm run a security audit of the network with Mythos.

Shockey added that the pool of willing sellers has dwindled. Even if structurally, AI is a much more compelling and asymmetric bet in the eyes of allocators, many of these crypto assets have simply run out of marginal sellers despite some shorter-term narrative-driven pumps. The only people left to sell at this point are the teams themselves and VCs.

Net-net: oversold conditions plus exhausted seller bases plus a macro backdrop thats stabilized equals a snapback, especially in names that have real usage or community conviction behind them,” Shockey told Sherwood.

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