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

Publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies added another $49 million worth of ETH to its stash last week, acquiring 27,801 ETH. 

The firm now holds 5,770,038 ETH, nearly 4.8% of the token’s circulating supply, valued around $10.1 billion as Ethereum trades around $1,780 on Monday. 

BitMine’s latest purchase comes amid a strong week for the underlying Ethereum network, according to its chairman Tom Lee, who pointed to the strong public debut for Robinhood’s Ethereum layer-2 network, Robinhood Chain. (Disclaimer: Tom Lee is an investor in Dastan, the parent company of Decrypt). 

“One of the biggest crypto success stories in 2026 is the breakaway success of the Robinhood Chain L2 mainnet on July 1, built on Arbitrum,” said Lee in a statement.

“Already, dollar volumes have exceeded $1 billion, and Robinhood Chain now has more trading volume than any other decentralized exchange (DEX), demonstrating the outstanding utility and product market fit for Ethereum, which is the underlying chain,” he added. 

DEX volumes on the chain in the last week have surpassed $3 billion according to data from DeFi Llama, but it still trails more established networks like Ethereum and Solana, which have registered $7.27 billion and $12.34 billion worth of DEX volume over the same time period, respectively. 

Robinhood Chain, which finalizes on Ethereum and uses ETH as its native gas token, has blossomed in the early going, creating small fortunes for some early meme coin traders on the blockchain—like one individual who turned $85 into more than $2 million in paper gains.

“Robinhood’s 27 million users are paying crypto fees denominated in ETH,” said Lee. “In other words, everyday users are starting to see ETH as money,” he added. 

While the mobile brokerage may boast millions of users, data gathered by Token Terminal points to just 788,000 active addresses on Robinhood Chain thus far. 

Despite the activity, ETH has dropped around 2% in the last 24 hours and has only gained around 1.3% in the last week of trading. That marks significant outperformance of shares in BitMine (BMNR), though, which have dipped 5.7% in the last five trading days. 

BitMine shares are trading around $14.65 shortly after the opening bell on Monday, down more than 2.2% since trading began.