BitMine makes smallest purchase of ethereum as asset rises in the new year

Ethereum is trading below $2,000, a nearly 40% drawdown in the last 30 days and a 60% decline from its all-time high of $4,946 set in August 2025. Despite the pullback, institutions are still expanding their presence in the ethereum ecosystem. 

• BlackRock took a step toward listing its staked ethereum ETF, a Tuesday amendment filing with the US Securities and Exchange Commission shows. The financial titan purchased $100,000 worth of seed shares where the proceeds will be used to purchase ethereum. 

• Ethereum’s largest treasury firm, BitMine Immersion Technologies, announced on Tuesday that it acquired 45,759 tokens worth $90.1 million at current prices and increased its staking operations to 3 million tokens, bringing annualized staking revenue to $176 million, a press release stated.

• Meanwhile, Harvard University’s endowment gained exposure to the second-largest cryptocurrency for the first time by purchasing 3.9 million million shares of BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust ETF, worth around $86.8 million, per an SEC filing. Simultaneously, the Harvard Management Company sold about 1.5 million shares of the iShares Bitcoin Trust, decreasing its stake by 21%. 

The changes in institutional exposure to ethereum comes as investor sentiment is at “rock bottom,” according to BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, reminiscent of the forlornness during the 2018 crypto winter and 2022 November lows amid the collapse of the now bankrupt exchange FTX. 

“Crypto has remained weak since the ‘price shock’ and massive deleveraging seen on October 10th. For us at Bitmine, we cannot control the price of Ethereum, and the company is acquiring ETH regardless of price trend, as the long-term outlook for Ethereum remains outstanding,” Lee said in a statement.

On Sunday, Logan Paul sold his Pikachu Illustrator “Pokémon” card for a record $16.5 million to AJ Scaramucci, son of former White House Communications Director Anthony Scaramucci. 

The sale price is more than triple what Paul paid to acquire the card five years ago, nearly $5.3 million, a world record at the time. Since then, many of the trading cards have skyrocketed in value, outpacing baseball cards and even Meta.

The sale has drawn controversy in the crypto industry, as Paul had announced in 2022 that the card would be tokenized and listed on his digital collectibles platform, Liquid Marketplace. Since then, the platform has since been accused of “multi-layered fraud in the crypto asset sector,” according to a 2024 filing from Canada’s Ontario Securities Commission. 

“I had originally offered to sell up to 51% of the Illustrator on Liquid Marketplace but ultimately only 5.4% of the card was sold for about $270k in the Summer of 2022 to fractional owners,” Paul wrote on social media. 

“In May 2024, I bought the card back for the same price it was sold for per the terms of LM and made funds available for users to withdraw. I was told that those funds were available to be withdrawn for approximately a year after being deposited in LM users’ accounts,” Paul added.