Who Is Buying Ethereum: Whales Buy, Price Stalls

Ethereum is trading near $1,850 as of Tuesday, drifting in a tight range after failing to hold the $1,950-$2,000 zone it tested in late July. The obvious question — who is buying Ethereum, and does it matter — has a real answer this week: corporate treasuries and a handful of large wallets are still accumulating, even as the pace has clearly cooled. BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest publicly traded ETH holder, added 10,399 ETH (roughly $19-20 million) in the week to August 2, taking its total to 5,797,813 ETH — down sharply from the 100,000-plus ETH per week it was buying earlier this year, after chairman Tom Lee said BitMine is deliberately slowing purchases to redirect cash toward a stock buyback. The current total is about 4.8% of Ethereum's 120.7 million circulating supply, putting Lee within striking distance of his stated "Alchemy of 5%" target — a 6 million ETH stack he's floated as the threshold where treasury ownership starts to matter structurally.

SharpLink, the second-largest ETH treasury company, is a smaller but steadier buyer, sitting near 888,000 ETH after a recent $75 million raise and ongoing staking-reward reinvestment. And Arthur Hayes, the BitMEX co-founder turned macro commentator, has rebuilt a 7,213 ETH over-the-counter position since mid-July — routed through desks like Galaxy, FalconX and Cumberland to avoid moving the order book — even while sitting on an estimated $300,000 paper loss on the trade. None of that reads like hesitation.

Here's the catch. BitMine's $19-20 million weekly purchase is about 0.1% of Ethereum's roughly $8 billion in average daily trading volume. In a market that size, one treasury's weekly buy is a rounding error, not a catalyst — which is exactly why ETH has stayed pinned near $1,850 instead of rallying on the news. The accumulation story explains why price hasn't fallen further, not why it hasn't gone up.

The mechanism behind BitMine's buying spree is also running into a wall. Through most of 2026, BitMine's stock traded at a premium to the value of the ETH it held — letting the company raise equity above book value and use the proceeds to buy ETH below that value, a flywheel that funded aggressive accumulation. That premium has compressed sharply, and BMNR shares have at times traded near or below net asset value. Buying more ETH by issuing more stock now risks diluting existing shareholders below what their shares are actually worth, which caps how aggressively BitMine can keep adding without a shareholder backlash — and helps explain why it chose a buyback over more ETH purchases last month.

The "everyone is buying" framing also doesn't survive contact with the exchange data. Back in May, a wallet linked to trader Garrett Jin moved roughly $1.35 billion in ETH onto Binance — the kind of transfer that typically precedes a sale, not a hold. Large holders are not acting as a bloc. Some are building long-term positions through staking and treasury structures; others have positioned to sell into whatever liquidity shows up. That split matters more than the accumulation headlines suggest, because it means the "whales are buying" narrative is really "some whales are buying, and we can't see what the sellers are doing until they act."

Spot ETH ETFs complicate the picture further. They're now on a fourth consecutive week of net inflows, but at a pace of tens of millions of dollars a day — far below the $600 million-to-$1 billion days these funds saw in August 2025. Zoom out and the bigger story isn't a shortfall, it's volatility: cumulative 2026 net inflows are still solidly positive, above $11 billion, but that total was built mostly earlier in the year — an eight-week outflow streak from mid-May into early July erased billions before this month's modest rebound. That's a bigger, more volatile flow channel than any single treasury, and its swing from steady inflows to two months of outflows did more to cap ETH this year than BitMine's buying has done to lift it.

The part of the accumulation story that is real, and durable, is supply removal rather than demand. About 85% of BitMine's 5.8 million ETH — roughly 4.92 million tokens — is staked, which locks it out of circulating liquidity for the medium term. Add SharpLink's staking activity and the broader trend of ETH moving into validators, and you get a slow, multi-quarter shrinking of the freely tradable float. That's a floor-building process: it makes ETH structurally scarcer over time and reduces how much sell pressure the market has to absorb during a downturn. It is not, on its own, a mechanism that forces price higher on any given week. Floors and rallies are different things, and conflating them is the most common mistake in how this accumulation story gets told.

The base case is more of the same: ETH holding a range around current levels through August, with treasury and whale buying acting as a background bid that limits how far price can fall without providing the volume needed to force a breakout. Two things could flip that. If BMNR's stock re-rates back to a premium over its ETH holdings, the equity-to-crypto flywheel reopens and BitMine's buying pace could reaccelerate meaningfully. Separately, if ETF inflows extend well past four weeks into a sustained trend — rather than reversing, as they have twice already this year — that's a bigger dollar channel than any single treasury and the more likely source of an actual move.

The nearer-term test is macro, not crypto-specific: Friday's US jobs report and the Federal Reserve's September rate decision will probably do more to set ETH's direction over the next month than anything BitMine, SharpLink or Arthur Hayes buy in the meantime. Watch BitMine's Monday holdings disclosures for whether it crosses that 6 million ETH mark, and watch whether ETF flows can string together a fifth positive week — those are the two data points that would turn this from a quiet accumulation story into something the price actually has to respond to.