저자: Louis · 외국인
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Bitmine은 ETH 스테이킹으로 2026년 5월 분기 매출 4,570만달러(매출의 98%)를 올렸고, 연 2.84억달러 수익 가능성을 제시한다. 그러나 스테이킹 보상의 상당 부분은 신규 발행분이며, 네트워크 스테이킹 비율 상승에 따라 수익률은 압축되고 있다. 같은 분기 순손실은 약 8,300만달러로, ETH 가격 하락에 따른 평가손실이 컸다. 규제(SEC 해석 변경 가능성)와 프로토콜 거버넌스 리스크도 존재한다. 결론적으로 yield가 가격 하락 위험을 막아주지 못하며, 레버리지 성격의 가격 베팅에 가깝다는 입장이다. 구독 서비스 홍보가 포함되어 있다.
다듬은 글
Tom Lee's Bitmine just pulled off something Michael Sailor's strategy is completely incapable of doing. In a single quarter, Bitmine earned $45.7 million without selling a single coin. That was 98% of its revenue generated by an asset that pays you just for holding it. And Tom Lee says that number climbs to $284 million a year once everything is switched on.
So, does that make ETH a fundamentally better treasury asset than Bitcoin? Or is this still just a leveraged bet on price with a nice dividend attached? Well, today we're going to break down exactly what Bitmine did, and how that income is actually generated, why this is mechanically impossible for a Bitcoin treasury to replicate, and whether that $284 million promise is as robust as it's being presented.
My name is Louis and you're watching the Coin Bureau. Now, in order to get a proper picture of how this all came about, we need to consider who Tom Lee is and what Bitmine actually became. Bit mine Immersion Technologies used to be a fairly standard Bitcoin mining and hosting operation. But then it pivoted hard.
Under Tom Lee's chairmanship, it transformed into an Ethereum treasury company. And the scale of that pivot has honestly just been crazy. For the quarter ending the 31st of May 2026, Bitmine reported $46.5 million in total revenue. Of that, $45.7 million came from Ethereum staking and validation. That's 98% of everything the company earned.
The remaining sliver, around $792,000, came from legacy Bitcoin mining and a bit of consulting. And to give you a sense of the transformation, in the same quarter a year earlier, total revenue was around $2 million. So revenue grew roughly 22 times over. But here's where it gets interesting, because we need to look at how this money is actually made.
When you hold Ethereum, you could stake it, which means locking it up to help secure the network and validate transactions. In return, the protocol pays you rewards. Think of it as getting paid for helping maintain the infrastructure that keeps the whole system running. Bitmine does this through its own in-house validator platform called Maven, the made in America validator network built after it acquired an Australian staking firm.
And the numbers behind it are enormous. As of mid July 2026, Bitmine held roughly 5.77 million ETH. That's roughly 4.8% of the entire circulating supply of Ethereum. of that stack around 4.92 million ETH roughly 85% is actively staked and earning. Tom Lee has branded the whole strategy the alchemy of 5% of all ETH in existence.
The goal of accumulating 5% and they're about 96% of the way there. So when Lee projects $284 million annually that's the figure for full deployment. That means the remaining 15% of the treasury also gets staked. $284 million a year paid in yield for essentially holding an asset. Now let's compare that to Bitcoin and Strategy's model.
Because Bitcoin by design cannot do a single thing Bitmine just did. Strategy holds somewhere around 845,000 Bitcoin. That's an enormous position worth tens of billions of dollars. And what does all that Bitcoin earn? Well, nothing. not a scent. It sits in cold storage generating zero cash flow. Now, for years, that didn't really matter because Strategy traded at a premium to the value of its Bitcoin.
That's called MNAV, the ratio of the company's market value to the value of its underlying coins. At its peak in 2024, that premium hits somewhere near three times the value of its Bitcoin holdings. The market was valuing the company at multiples of its actual Bitcoin holdings. strategy could issue new shares above that inflated value.
Buy more Bitcoin and everyone got richer on the way up. But that premium when it really comes down to it is more narrative than anything else. It's a story the market tells itself about scarcity and access. There's no income underneath of it. And by June 2026, that story was taking quite a hit. Strategies MNAV fell below 1 to around 0.99.
That means the market valued the company at less than the raw bitcoin sitting on its balance sheet. And when mav falls below one, strategy's glorious flywheel is at risk of reversing. Issuing new shares becomes dilutive instead of accreditive. The thing that justified the whole premium breaks. And then came the moment hardcore strategy proponents never thought that they'd actually see.
Strategy broke its famous never sell pledge. In June 2026, it sold 32 Bitcoin to help cover dividend obligations on its preferred shares, the first divestment in four years. The board also authorized selling up to $1.25 billion of Bitcoin if needed. So, there's the core mechanical difference laid bare.
When Strategy needs cash, it has to sell the asset. When Bitmine needs cash, the assets pay for it. One produces a stream of income. the other produces a very good story and a bunch of unrealized gains. So, I guess that's the case closed, right? We're all ETH maxis now. Well, not quite. Because before we crown Ethereum the winner, we need to take a closer look at the mechanics behind all of this.
Because that staking yield, it isn't quite the free money that sounds like. A significant chunk of Ethereum staking rewards doesn't come from external revenue at all. It comes from protocol issuance. That's newly minted ETH freshly created by the network to pay validators. So in plain terms, a lot of your yield is really just the network printing more ETH and handing it to the people who staked.
If you stake, you avoid being diluted. If you don't, you get diluted. That's hardly the same thing as earning a profit from an outside customer. And then there's the risk that Bitcoin holders never have to think about. Staking introduces something called slashing. If your validator misbehaves, double signs, or goes offline in the wrong way, the protocol penalizes you, and takes some of your ETH.
The historical base rate is low. Only about 0.04% of validators have ever been slashed since late 2020. Low, but not zero. With Ethereum, you've also got smart contract risk, validator concentration risk, and a centralization problem. One provider, Lido, still controls roughly a quarter of all staked ETH, down from a 2023 peak of nearly 32%.
That's a single point of failure and a very tempting target. Now, some ETH maxis would call Bitcoin a boring digital rock, but that status can be considered one of Bitcoin's strongest features. Bitcoin has no validators locking up capital. That means no slashing. There's no smart contract attack surface, and there's no staking surface for a regulator to point at and call a security.
Bitcoin's refusal to generate yield is a deliberate design choice that removes an entire category of risk. Bitcoin doesn't pay you, so nobody can be accused of running an investment scheme on top of it. So, the trade-off is there. There's income on one side, but structural simplicity on the other. And making the right decision for you and your risk tolerance is essential.
But keeping track of all of this, you know, the yield mechanics, the regulatory shifts, the treasury moves, it takes a lot of time and the market is always changing. So if you want to cut through the noise and stay ahead of the market, we've made it easy because right here on YouTube, you can now access the Coin Bureau Club light plan.
For just $10 a month, you'll get daily market updates across both crypto and tradi. Our teams read on the best opportunities out there and curated updates with only the details that actually are important. Just tap the join button below this video to get started. Now, let's get back to the numbers because now we need to run a quick check on that headline $284 million figure that's being thrown around by Bitmine.
So, Bitmine's ETH treasury is worth somewhere around $10.5 billion. $284 million of yield on that is roughly 2.7%. Measure it against the staked portion or against the company's market cap and you land in the same range somewhere between 2.7 and 3.2%. Low single digits. Now, let me put that in context.
For much of the last few years, you could get more than that from short-term US treasuries. That's as close to risk-free as you could get in the market. no smart contract risk or volatile asset underneath. So then is roughly 3% really enough to call this a business rather than a leveraged bet on price?
But there's more to it than that because that $284 million isn't a fixed floor. It's sensitive to something Bitmine doesn't control at all. Networkwide staking participation. And what do I mean by that? Well, Ethereum's issuance pool is roughly fixed. The more ETH that gets staked across the entire network, the more validators are splitting that same pool.
So, the per validator yield shrinks. Network-wide staking yields have compressed from around 5.5% back in 2023 down to roughly 2.6 to 3.8% today. That's a drop of nearly half in 3 years. And with around 32 to 34% of ETH's supply currently staked, there's still room for that number to climb further and the yield to keep compressing.
So, Bitmine would have to keep buying more and more ETH just to keep its dollar revenue flat against a shrinking yield. Now, remember that 45.7 million in staking revenue. In that same quarter, Bitmine reported a net loss of somewhere between 82 and $84 million. The company earned a record 45.7 million from staking and still lost nearly double that on the bottom line.
Why? Because Ethereum's price cratered and unrealized losses on its treasury and derivatives swamped everything. Roughly $92 million in markdowns. And this is the crux of the whole reflexivity problem. Staking rewards are paid in ETH. When ETH's dollar price falls, the value of your reward falls as well.
The yield can stay rock steady while the actual money it represents collapses. Now, Bitmine's average cost basis is a bit disputed, but the company itself sites around $3,500. Whatever the exact number, with ETH trading sub $2,000 as I make this video, that's an unrealized loss running into the billions of dollars on the treasury.
The stock is down around 65% over the year. And on top of all of that, BitMine's preferred shares pays a 9.5% dividend in weekly cash, a fixed obligation that has to be met regardless of what ETH does. So, the staking income doesn't save you when the price has. It just softens the fall a little. Better than a pure Bitcoin hold in a sideways market, but it's certainly not safe from a crash.
And there's one more thing to consider when comparing ETH and Bitcoin Treasury companies, and that is regulation. Staking as a service has been an SEC lightning rod for years. Back in February 2023, the SEC came down on Kraken's staking program, hit it with a $30 million settlement, and forced it to shut the service down for US customers entirely.
That was the template for hostility. Now, to be fair, Posture has since softened dramatically. The SEC dropped nearly all its major crypto lawsuits in 2025 and pivoted towards formal rulemaking. Reports point to a 2026 interpretive stance treating protocol staking as generally not a securities transaction as long as the provider acts in a purely administrative role.
But that's the optimistic interpretation the entire yieldbearing treasury model now rests on. And that's guidance, not law. A future SEC could revise or withdraw it without passing anything. The Clarity Act, which would actually codify these boundaries in the statute, is stalled in the Senate. And then there's yet another risk that has nothing to do with the SEC at all, Ethereum's own governance.
It's entirely possible that future protocol level proposals redirect a chunk of validator rewards elsewhere, cutting the yield that flows to shareholders without any of them getting a vote. So the entire income thesis for every ETH treasury company rests on two things. A reversible interpretation and a network that can restructure its own economics.
Bitcoin by having no yield and no service to target is immune from this entire category of risk. The idea that yield transforms a volatile asset into something of a business just doesn't really add up. The numbers say that that's only half true. The yield is great, don't get me wrong, but it does not and cannot protect you from the price of the underlying asset falling off of a cliff.
A 3% yield is cold comfort when the thing paying it drops 48% in a year. So, Bitmine investors buying the ETH is a productive asset concept need to be clear on what they're actually buying. They're buying a leveraged position on a volatile asset with a modest yield stabled on top, not a bond and not a business with customers.
Treasury companies can issue preferred shares and equity on the strength of a compelling yield narrative, raising capital to buy ever more of the asset, and the executives love that because the investment case looks like a business as opposed to a trade. But the everyday investor is the one holding the risk.
Investing in an ETH vehicle that sees $284 million in revenue can sound like a solid and safe investment, but the same company just posted an $83 million loss. So, let's sum this all up. Bitcoin stores value and does nothing else. And Sailor's broken never sell pledge shows what happens when a no yield asset runs into cash obligations.
Ethereum produces revenue and Bitmine's $45.7 million quarter proves that. But that same quarter's $83 million loss proves the yield doesn't remove the risk. Earning yield on holdings is a great feature for a treasury company. But when it comes down to whether this makes for a solid long-term investment, there's much more to consider.
But what do you think? Does cash flow make ETH the better treasury asset or is Bitmine just a more sophisticated leverage bet on price with a dividend attached? Let us know your thoughts in the comments down below. And if you want to understand the other side of this fight, how strategy built the Bitcoin Treasury model that Bitbine is now challenging, then definitely check out our full breakdown on that right over here.
Thank you all so much for watching and I'll see you again very soon. This is Lewis signing off.
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