Tom Lee Eyes ETH ‘Supercycle’ as BitMine Absorbs Nearly 3% of Supply Amid Liquidity Strain

The signal isn’t the headline number—it’s the float. BitMine Immersion Technologies just added 54,156 ETH—roughly $170 million last week—pushing its holdings to 3,559,879 ETH. That’s now valued at over $11.1 billion and represents nearly 3% of Ethereum’s circulating supply. In a market wrestling with weaker liquidity, that kind of steady absorption changes how price discovers value.

BitMine has become the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury and the second-largest public crypto treasury overall, behind Strategy’s roughly $61 billion Bitcoin reserve. Beyond its ETH position, BitMine holds 192 BTC (about $18 million) and $607 million in cash. The firm keeps accumulating through drawdowns; ETH fell more than 11% over the past week and sits about 35% below its August all-time high.

Tom Lee, BitMine’s chairman, isn’t backing off. He’s calling for an Ethereum “supercycle” and argues that, over a long horizon, ETH can plausibly deliver a 100x outcome similar to Bitcoin’s performance since his team first recommended BTC around $1,000 in 2017. He emphasized that Bitcoin’s path included six drawdowns greater than 50% and three deeper than 75%—yet by 2025, it still realized a 100x move from that initial call. In Lee’s current framework, five forces drive crypto cycles; two appear most explanatory now and point to a potential cycle peak in 12 to 36 months.

Near term, his lens is microstructure. The market is digesting October’s record liquidation—more than $19 billion of positions erased in a day. Lee suggests a key market maker may have taken a hit, creating a balance-sheet “hole.” When that happens, capital gets raised, inventory gets trimmed, and liquidity provision shrinks—functionally a crypto version of quantitative tightening. In 2022, a similar dynamic lingered for 6–8 weeks. That kind of temporary liquidity drought can mute rallies, deepen dips, and make large buy programs feel like they’re pushing on slack demand.

You can see the tug-of-war in probabilities. Myriad, a product of Dastan, currently leans slightly—about 51%—toward ETH sliding to $2,500 rather than running to $4,000, though those odds have flipped multiple times in the past 24 hours as price has moved. That is what thin books do: they turn every incremental order into information.

Here’s the tension I’m watching: BitMine’s program systematically removes float while a suspected market-maker retrenchment reduces the depth that normally absorbs flow. Supply concentration plus thinner liquidity often increases volatility in both directions. If the liquidity gap heals on the timeline Lee references and BitMine maintains pace, the reflexivity can accelerate—what felt like dead money becomes kinetic very quickly. Conversely, if liquidity repair takes longer, treasury-style accumulation can underperform expectations for a stretch.

Markets are already voting on that basis. BitMine’s shares (BMNR) dropped nearly 6% Monday to $32.37 and are down about 35% over the month—worse than ETH (-19%) and Bitcoin (-12%) over the same period. The company also installed a new CEO on Friday, a governance shift that investors will weigh against the strategy’s execution risk.

The supercycle debate will always polarize. What matters operationally is whether durable buyers can keep absorbing supply faster than the market’s capacity to warehouse risk. BitMine is doing its part on the demand side. The rest hinges on when liquidity normalizes—and whether ETH’s narrative can outlast the chop long enough for that to matter.