- Ether is trading near $2,375, up more than 20% over the past week, after a U.S. Treasury debt-buyback expansion and a new SEC crypto-token proposal.
- U.S. spot ether ETFs pulled in roughly $189 million on Aug. 19 alone, their strongest single day since October, snapping weeks of outflows.
- BitMine Immersion Technologies, which holds 4.8% of all ether, has cut its own weekly purchases to a fraction of its spring pace even as its chairman publicly cheered the rally.
Ether climbed more than 20% over the past week to trade near $2,375 on Friday, after the U.S. Treasury Department moved to buy back more of its own long-term debt and the Securities and Exchange Commission proposed new rules for selling crypto tokens to the public.
The Treasury said on Aug. 19 that it will raise the size of its long-end buyback operations from a $2 billion cap to at least $4 billion per operation starting Sept. 9, a step it described as supporting liquidity in the market for longer-dated bonds. A day earlier, the SEC proposed a rule called Regulation Crypto Assets that would let companies raise up to $75 million a year from crypto token sales under lighter disclosure requirements than a full public stock offering.
Spot ether ETFs joined the move too, led by inflows into BlackRock’s and Fidelity’s ether funds, alongside a similarly strong Aug. 19 for bitcoin’s own ETFs.
But the clearest public cheer for that ETF number came from someone with a direct financial stake in the outcome. Tom Lee, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, called the inflow figure “a good sign” in a post on X the same day. BitMine is not a disinterested bystander: it holds about 5.8 million ether, roughly 4.8% of the entire supply, worth close to $13.8 billion at Friday’s price.
BitMine’s Own Buying Has Slowed to a Crawl
That stake also makes BitMine one of the year’s largest marginal buyers of ether, and the company’s own weekly disclosures show that buyer pulling back well before this week’s rally began. In early June, BitMine bought 126,971 ether in a single week. By mid-August its weekly purchases had fallen to a range of roughly 7,000 to 10,400 ether, where they have held for more than a month. Lee has said the company is approaching a self-set target of owning 5% of ether’s total supply and has been shifting cash toward buying back its own shares instead of buying more ether.
None of this makes the rally manufactured. The Treasury’s buyback increase and the SEC’s proposal are both real, on-the-record policy actions, and the ETF inflow figures come from independently reported fund data, not from BitMine or Lee. But the loudest on-record voice framing this week’s demand as confirmation of a turn is also the chairman of ether’s largest known corporate holder. That holder’s own buying, one of 2026’s biggest sources of ether demand outside the ETFs, had quietly throttled itself down to its lowest sustained pace of the year at the same moment.
What happens next should show which read holds up. If ETF demand keeps building on its own, or if BitMine’s purchases pick back up despite sitting close to its self-imposed cap, the rally will have found support sturdier than one large holder talking up a position he already holds. If the ETF inflows fade the way earlier rebounds have this year, the market will be left leaning on a buyer who has already said he is stepping back.
