Tom Lee's Bitmine Is Buying Ethereum Hand Over Fist. Is the Long-Awaited Crypto Bull Market Finally Here?

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) is buying up plenty of Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) every week, and it's making investors wonder whether a new crypto bull market is playing out in its early innings. Bitmine holds 6,001,302 ETH as of Sept. 27, 2026, or 4.9% of the coin's total supply, putting it very close to the goal of its chairman, Tom Lee, who aspires to own a full 5%.

According to Lee, a fresh crypto bull market started in late June. If he's right, a rally could push Bitmine's stock back to a premium over its crypto, letting it fund far more Ethereum buying. Let's take a look at what Bitmine is doing and how it factors into the odds of there being a new crypto bull run.

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Bitmine is buying a coin that's still well below its peak price

Bitmine is a digital asset treasury (DAT), a public company that aspires to buy and hold as much of a target cryptocurrency as its access to financing can support. Strategy, for instance, is the largest in that category of cryptocurrency stocks, and it held 847,666 Bitcoin as of Sept. 27, 2026.

Investors get a sense of the valuation of these DATs using a metric called the multiple of net asset value (mNAV), which compares a company's market value, adjusted for debt and cash, to the value of its crypto holdings. According to data from CoinGecko, Bitmine's mNAV was 1.0 as of Oct. 1, meaning that it isn't priced at a premium right now. When such a business is priced at a premium, it can sell its shares to the market to raise capital, and then immediately use the proceeds to buy crypto to boost its crypto per share.

At an mNAV at or below 1x, that flywheel doesn't work. A bull market could, however, juice prices enough to restart the process.

Is the bull market here or not?

Ethereum was priced at $2,679 on Oct. 1, 46% below its record of $4,946.

Many of Bitmine's earlier purchases were made while Ethereum was approaching that high. For it to break even on those investments, Ethereum's price would need to rise. That's why it's best to take Lee's comments about the new crypto bull market with a grain of salt -- his company profits if he's right. Still, there's some pretty strong evidence that a bull market is either approaching, or already here.

As of July 1 of this year, just after the bear market's bottom in late June, the total crypto sector market cap was near $2.1 trillion. At the end of September, it was worth nearly $3 trillion. Ethereum is up by 55% over the last three months, and Bitcoin is up by 35%.

While both are still far from their all-time highs, momentum like this simply doesn't occur during bear markets. Plus, at least so far, these uptrends have been resilient in the face of bearish catalysts like skyrocketing oil prices and the failed vote on the Clarity Act.

So if a new bull market isn't officially here already, it's mostly because it's an arbitrary term rather than something that's empirically testable. Expect Tom Lee to keep buying Ethereum either way.

Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin and Ethereum. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.