BitMine’s ETH Bet Trails Hyperliquid’s HYPE Gains

On June 30, 2025, BitMine placed 5.4 million ether into its corporate treasury after launching an Ethereum treasury strategy funded by a $250 million private placement. Tom Lee is listed as the company’s chairman.

Since that allocation, the ETH holding is down about 21.45%. Hyperliquid’s HYPE token rose about 67.82% over the same period and roughly 101% over the past 12 months, trading near $67.14 at the time of reporting.

BitMine moved most of the position into ether and staked about 87% on its MAVAN platform. The company estimates the staking arrangement produces roughly $276 million in annualized revenue.

BitMine’s reported position shows roughly $8 billion in unrealized losses on ETH at current prices. Company trading and custody at the scale of the position were factors in the firm’s execution.

Hyperliquid’s market capitalization is near $14.9 billion. The protocol routes a large share of trading fees into open-market HYPE purchases; its buyback program has absorbed more than $1.16 billion in fees since launch. HYPE holds about 57.8% of the perpetual DEX market.

A counterfactual calculation by degennQuant, cofounder of Hyperbeat, estimated that allocating the same capital to HYPE instead of ETH would produce a 520% gain and about $44 billion in hypothetical profit, and that figure would rise if HYPE clears $100.

Jeff Sprecher, chief executive of ICE, remarked to investors that Hyperliquid’s scale and efficiency were striking: ‘This Hyperliquid that we’re talking — if you haven’t heard about it, it’s bigger than NASDAQ, okay? It’s 11 people. You look at it, you’re like, wow, that’s pretty something.’

Kyle Samani, who left Multicoin Capital earlier this year, raised technical and decentralization concerns about Hyperliquid’s validator set and design choices. He argued those elements favor a centralized model and may not translate to a permissionless environment.

David Hoffman, co-owner at Bankless, commented on optics around the unrealized losses and contemporaneous activity by Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin: ‘Tom Lee is down eight billion dollars on ETH and Vitalik decides to write a sci fi novel.’

Observers note the contrast between BitMine’s ETH allocation and HYPE performance reflects different time horizons and use cases: HYPE emphasizes fee capture and trader experience, while BitMine’s ETH position targets on-chain settlement, tokenization and institutional exposure.