Leading Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies made its largest ETH-denominated purchase of 2026 last week, adding 126,971 ETH or around $214 million worth of the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap.
The firm’s major acquisition comes amid what the firm sees as a “strengthening case” for Ethereum following the AI-assisted discovery of a vulnerability in privacy protocol Zcash. Uncertainty over whether the vulnerability was actually exploited led to a 40% plunge in the price of Zcash’s ZEC token last week, though it has since recovered some of those losses.
“The broad selloff in crypto, in our view, is a superficial take,” said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, in a statement. (Disclaimer: Lee is an investor in Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan).
“AI systems are going to find flaws in centralized financial services rails and weak decentralized protocols,” he said. “We believe this actually strengthens the use case and product market fit for hardened and reliable decentralized blockchains like Ethereum.”
Ethereum has rebounded around 4% in the last 24 hours, but has still fallen nearly 15% in the last week of trading, recently changing hands around $1,686.
The firm’s major acquisition comes amid what the firm sees as a “strengthening case” for Ethereum following the AI-assisted discovery of a vulnerability in privacy protocol Zcash. Uncertainty over whether the vulnerability was actually exploited led to a 40% plunge in the price of Zcash’s ZEC token last week, though it has since recovered some of those losses.
“The broad selloff in crypto, in our view, is a superficial take,” said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee, in a statement. (Disclaimer: Lee is an investor in Decrypt’s parent company, Dastan).
“AI systems are going to find flaws in centralized financial services rails and weak decentralized protocols,” he said. “We believe this actually strengthens the use case and product market fit for hardened and reliable decentralized blockchains like Ethereum.”
Ethereum has rebounded around 4% in the last 24 hours, but has still fallen nearly 15% in the last week of trading, recently changing hands around $1,686.
5 months ago
