BitMine Trading Halted Twice as Ethereum Treasury Firm Soars

In brief

BitMine shares closed at $135, a 2,150% leap from when the company named Fundstrat co-founder and CIO Tom Lee as board chair on Monday.
Investors who participated in BitMine’s $250 million private placement had massive gains on paper, but they weren’t allowed to sell their shares.
Crypto treasury firms SharpLink Gaming and Upexi’s shares plunged last month after the SEC deemed their registration-of-shares filings effective.

BitMine Immersion Technologies shares were halted twice on Thursday, as the firm’s stock price soared for a third straight day after an early-week announcement of an Ethereum treasury strategy.

The stock was halted shortly after 11 a.m. ET and then immediately again.

BitMine shares closed at $135 on Thursday, a 130% increase, but fell to $118 in after-hours trading, according to Yahoo Finance. Since the company announced that Fundstrat founder and CIO Tom Lee was appointed board chair, shares have rallied nearly 1,900% from $6 on Monday.

Lee, who frequently appears on CNBC, said this week on “Squawk Box” that BitMine will accumulate Ethereum before a stablecoin boom crystallizes demand for the asset.

With a regulatory framework for stablecoins inching toward passage on Capitol Hill, he said it’s likely that big banks like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs will begin staking the asset in bulk, as a way to secure the network and billions of dollars of newly-issued, dollar-pegged tokens.

“We’re trying to get in front of that by creating a treasury vehicle,” he said.

BitMine, which operates Bitcoin mining facilities in Texas and Trinidad, said in a press release on Monday that it raised $250 million through a private placement, which included participation from Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, crypto venture capital firm Pantera, crypto prime broker FalconX, and crypto conglomerate Digital Currency Group and Lee.

The transaction involved the purchase and sale of 55 million shares for $4.50 each. As of Thursday, BitMine had a float of 1.4 million shares, indicating investors who participated in the private placement had massive gains on paper but were not able to trade their shares yet.

Ethereum treasury firm SharpLink Gaming’s shares plunged 70% after its registration-of-shares filing was deemed effective by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. Not long after, Solana Treasury firm Upexi’s stock cratered on a similar filing.

Shares from BitMine’s private placement “may not be offered or sold […] except pursuant to an effective registration statement or an applicable exemption,” Monday’s press release said.

Mirroring the goal of most crypto treasury firms, BitMine seeks to maximize shareholder value by growing the amount of digital assets it owns per share, in this case Ethereum. BitMine noted on Monday that it has access to staking and decentralized finance, or DeFi.

Lee isn’t the only familiar face on CNBC leading a crypto treasury firm. Strike founder Jack Mallers is leading the Tether-backed, Bitcoin-buying firm Twenty One Capital as CEO, while Anthony Pompliano, a social media personality and entrepreneur, has created ProCap Financial, another Bitcoin treasury firm.

Edited by James Rubin