BitMine Bought 5.4M ETH Instead of HYPE; Position Down 21%

BitMine launched an Ethereum treasury strategy on June 30, 2025 backed by a $250 million private placement. Tom Lee, head of Fundstrat, joined BitMine as chairman. The firm acquired 5.4 million ETH and said the position was intended as a long-term institutional proxy for ether, targeting roughly 5% of the ether supply through alchemy and staking.

BitMine reports that about 87% of its ETH is staked on its MAVAN platform, producing an annualized revenue run rate of roughly $276 million. The firm framed the holding as an income-producing asset rather than a short-term market bet.

Since the June 30 allocation, BitMine’s ETH position is down about 21.45% in dollar terms. Over the same window Hyperliquid’s HYPE token rose about 67.82% and traded near $67.14 at the time of reporting, a 101% increase over the prior 12 months. Hyperliquid’s market capitalization was roughly $14.9 billion.

Hyperliquid routes most fee revenue into open-market HYPE repurchases. The project’s buyback program has used more than $1.16 billion in fees since launch, according to project disclosures. DegennQuant, cofounder of Hyperbeat, calculated that deploying BitMine’s capital into HYPE instead of ETH would imply roughly a 520% return and about $44 billion in hypothetical gains.

BitMine has emphasized that liquidity at its scale is a consideration and stated it has absorbed large paper losses without disrupting ETH order books. David Hoffman, co-owner at Bankless, estimated a paper loss near $8 billion and criticized the timing of some industry commentary. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin announced plans to pause his usual blog posts to write a science-fiction piece exploring decentralized governance.

ICE chief executive Jeff Sprecher highlighted Hyperliquid at an investor conference, noting the project’s apparent size relative to traditional venues despite a small core team. Industry data show Hyperliquid controls about 57.8% of perpetual decentralized exchange volume.

Kyle Samani, who left Multicoin Capital earlier this year, criticized Hyperliquid’s validator architecture and operational choices, arguing they resemble centralized exchanges and may not hold up in a permissionless setting. Samani said he believes many technical decisions that work in centralized contexts will not transfer to a decentralized environment.

The two positions rest on different institutional arguments: BitMine’s ETH stake emphasizes staking revenue and use of ether as on-chain settlement for tokenized assets and stablecoins; Hyperliquid’s token captures trading revenue and has benefited from fee-funded buybacks and rapid market adoption. Future changes in ETH and HYPE prices and the pace of on-chain adoption will determine how the two positions perform in dollar terms.