BitMine Buys $49 Million in Ethereum as Tom Lee Hails Early Robinhood Chain Demand – Decrypt

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury agency BitMine Immersion Applied sciences added one other $49 million price of ETH to its stash final week, buying 27,801 ETH. 

The agency now holds 5,770,038 ETH, practically 4.8% of the token’s circulating provide, valued round $10.1 billion as Ethereum trades round $1,780 on Monday. 

BitMine’s newest buy comes amid a robust week for the underlying Ethereum community, in accordance with its chairman Tom Lee, who pointed to the robust public debut for Robinhood’s Ethereum layer-2 community, Robinhood Chain. (Disclaimer: Tom Lee is an investor in Dastan, the father or mother firm of Decrypt). 

“One of many greatest crypto success tales in 2026 is the breakaway success of the Robinhood Chain L2 mainnet on July 1, constructed on Arbitrum,” stated Lee in an announcement.

“Already, greenback volumes have exceeded $1 billion, and Robinhood Chain now has extra buying and selling quantity than another decentralized change (DEX), demonstrating the excellent utility and product market match for Ethereum, which is the underlying chain,” he added. 

DEX volumes on the chain within the final week have surpassed $3 billion in accordance with information from DeFi Llama, however it nonetheless trails extra established networks like Ethereum and Solana, which have registered $7.27 billion and $12.34 billion price of DEX quantity over the identical time interval, respectively. 

Robinhood Chain, which finalizes on Ethereum and makes use of ETH as its native fuel token, has blossomed within the early going, creating small fortunes for some early meme coin merchants on the blockchain—like one particular person who turned $85 into greater than $2 million in paper positive factors.

“Robinhood’s 27 million customers are paying crypto charges denominated in ETH,” stated Lee. “In different phrases, on a regular basis customers are beginning to see ETH as cash,” he added. 

Whereas the cellular brokerage could boast thousands and thousands of customers, information gathered by Token Terminal factors to only 788,000 lively addresses on Robinhood Chain up to now. 

Regardless of the exercise, ETH has dropped round 2% within the final 24 hours and has solely gained round 1.3% within the final week of buying and selling. That marks important outperformance of shares in BitMine (BMNR), although, which have dipped 5.7% within the final 5 buying and selling days. 

BitMine shares are buying and selling round $14.65 shortly after the opening bell on Monday, down greater than 2.2% since buying and selling started.