Tom Lee
Adam Jeffery | CNBC
Fundstrat’s Tom Lee is joining a little known bitcoin miner aiming to become the biggest publicly traded holder of ether.
Lee, a high-profile market strategist known for his prescient bitcoin price forecasts and stock predictions, has been appointed chairman of the board of directors of BitMine Immersion Technologies, effective Monday. The company also announced a $250 million private placement to implement a buying strategy around ether, which it aims to make its primary treasury reserve asset while continuing with its core bitcoin mining business.
Lee’s appointment comes amid a groundswell of interest around stablecoins following the successful IPO of stablecoin issuer Circle at the beginning of the month and positive momentum pushing potential stablecoin legislation through Congress.
“Stablecoins have proven to be the ‘ChatGPT’ of crypto, leading to rapid adoption by consumers, merchants and financial services providers,” Lee said in a statement. “Ethereum is the blockchain where the majority of stablecoin payments are transacted … and thus, ETH should benefit from this growth.”
The company will monitor the value of ether held per company share as a key performance metric going forward, Lee added, similar to MicroStrategy’s bitcoin-per-share metric “BTC Yield.” BitMine can increase the value of ETH held per share “by a combination of reinvestment of the company’s cash flows, capital markets activities, and by the change in value of ETH,” according to Lee.
Companies are increasingly looking past bitcoin for crypto treasury management strategies. BitMine joins the publicly listed betting platform SharpLink Gaming, which initiated an ether treasury strategy in May and appointed Ethereum co-founder Joseph Lubin as chairman of its board of directors. DeFi Development is focused on a similar strategy for the Solana token.
Ahead of this transaction, Bitmine Immersion had a very tiny market value of just $26 million with lightly traded shares that were down 45% on the year.
