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. 

“We believe ETH prices should not be coming under pressure,” Lee added. 

As a result of its latest purchase, BitMine’s treasury has expanded to 5,543,872 ETH valued around $9.3 billion. From its total haul, around 85% is currently staked via its Made-in-America Validator Network (MAVAN), providing it with projected staking revenues of around $230 million annually.

Tom Lee’s Ethereum Treasury BitMine Prices Preferred Shares With 9.5% Dividend

If it were to stake its entire balance, it projects it would annualize around $270 million, according to Lee.

Ethereum fell to its lowest price in over a year last week, dipping to about $1,522 late Friday before ticking up over the weekend. The latest plunge has pushed BitMine even deeper into unrealized losses, with its Ethereum treasury currently about $9.7 billion underwater, per data from DropsTab.

Last week, BitMine announced plans to launch a preferred share that pays a 9.5% annual dividend, following the lead of $54 billion Bitcoin treasury giant Strategy. The firm upsized the offering to 3.5 million shares at $80 apiece, expecting to net about $274 million after fees to help fuel future ETH acquisitions and other business purposes.