Bitmine, the Largest Corporate Ether Holder, Now Owns Almost 5% of All ETH

The US Treasury is due to announce the size of its first enlarged buyback of 10-to-20-year securities today, the first sizing since its 19 August pledge to 'at least double' the programme, with Bessent describing the initiative as aimed at cooling 'this fever' in longer-dated bonds. Bitmine bought 28,086 ETH over the past week, lifting its treasury to 5.93M ETH worth about $14.8B — 4.9% of Ethereum's entire supply — with roughly 85% of it staked. Brent above $100 kept risk assets under pressure, with BTC dipping to an intraday low near $77,500 before rebounding.

Crypto

Derivatives

DeFi

Macro

In Today's Note

The US Treasury is due to announce the size of its first enlarged buyback of 10-to-20-year securities today, the first sizing since its 19 August pledge to 'at least double' the programme. Bessent said the initiative is aimed at cooling 'this fever' in longer-dated bonds.
Bitmine bought 28,086 ETH over the past week, lifting its treasury to 5.93M ETH worth about $14.8B — 4.9% of Ethereum's entire supply — with roughly 85% of it staked.

Market Snapshot: Overnight Moves

Macro & Markets

With oil prices continuing to move higher, fears of a knock-on effect on inflation and Fed policy pushed crypto asset prices and US equities lower for another day.
Brent crude currently trades just slightly above $100 per barrel, a level it last traded at in mid-July, while further announcements of strikes on Middle East energy infrastructure were reported.
BTC fell to an intraday low around $77,500 before rebounding, but as we’ve commented in past editions, it has struggled to hold meaningfully above $80,000.
The S&P 500 sold off for a second straight session, down 0.58%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average lost 1.18%, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq-100 declined by a smaller 0.12%.
Short-term Treasury yields moved higher, with the yield on the two-year note up 4bps to 4.41%. Fed fund futures contracts currently imply a 60% probability of a Fed rate increase in next week’s meeting.

Fox News reported that the US had struck targets near Kharg Island and the port city of Jask, while Iran’s state TV said tanker crews near Kuwaiti and Bahraini piers should “immediately abandon their vessels, whether at anchor or docked, as they will be targeted.”
The US military struck multiple Iranian oil tankers that officials say are linked to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. The strikes were a response to attempted attacks by Iran on at least one US ship in the area.
Saudi Arabia also defended itself against attacks on several energy facilities in the south from Iran-backed Houthi militants.
As part of the new sanctions effort to strain Iran economically, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control took action against numerous firms supporting Iran’s aviation sector yesterday.
The department added various Iranian airlines to its specially designated nationals list, and targeted firms including those in Turkey and the United Arab Emirates, that have supported Iran’s Mahan Air, which has continued to fly to destinations in the Middle East and China.
In a statement, Treasury said it sanctioned 36 targets “for supporting Iran’s aviation sector, which the regime uses to move weapons, personnel, and illicit cargo”, blaming “covert front companies, foreign intermediaries, and deceptive transshipment routes that Iran relies on to obtain US-origin aircraft and sensitive technology”.

With no signs of easing in the 6-month long conflict, markets are looking ahead to Friday’s CPI report from the BLS which is the last major macro data release before the FOMC’s meeting.
Economists project the consumer price index rose 0.4% in August, an acceleration from a month earlier, partly due to higher gasoline costs. Core CPI is projected to have risen by 0.2% which would bring the annual gauge down to 2.4%, the smallest year-over-year increase since 2021.

Today, the US Treasury department is expected to announce the size of the next day’s operation to repurchase outstanding 10-year to 20-year securities, with past precedent indicating an announcement around 11 a.m. Washington time.
It will mark the first release of the size of buybacks since Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s department first announced on August 19, 2026 that it would “at least double” the size of its buybacks of off-the-run securities.
Yesterday, Bessent described the initiative as aimed at cooling “this fever that was building” in the market, likely a reference to the global (and US based) selloff in longer-dated government bonds to multi-decade highs.

DeFi / Web3 / Altcoins / Crypto

Bitmine Immersion Technologies, the world’s largest corporate holder of ether, acquired 28,086 ETH over the past week, increasing its treasury to 5.93M ETH worth about $14.8B, equivalent to 4.9% of Ethereum’s 122M ETH supply.
Bitmine has 5.07M ETH, or about 85% of its holdings, staked, and projects roughly $330M in annualized staking revenue based on a 2.61% yield.
Chairman Tom Lee reiterated Bitmine’s conviction in ether, noting that ETH outperformed the S&P 500 by 5,430 basis points in the third quarter through Sept. 4 and saying, “The top 3 performing assets since June 30th are ETH, BTC and SOL.”

Strategy, the world’s largest corporate bitcoin holder, repurchased 1.81M shares of its STRC preferred stock for $176.3M using its cash reserves and doubled its authorization to repurchase digital credit securities from $1B to $2B.
The company made no bitcoin purchases or sales last week, leaving its holdings unchanged at 845,050 BTC worth about $66.1B, or more than 4% of bitcoin’s maximum supply.
The move follows Strategy’s purchase of 4,603 BTC for $369.7M the previous week, while its USD Reserve and USD Cash stood at $5.1B and $1.44B, respectively, as of Sept. 7.

Canary Capital, a U.S. digital asset investment firm, is set to launch the Canary Staked TRX ETF (TRXS) on Cboe BZX on Sept. 9, providing U.S. brokerage investors with regulated exposure to TRX, the native token of the Tron blockchain, while also earning staking rewards.
The fund plans to stake at least 90% of its TRX holdings, with investors retaining most of the resulting staking rewards after fees, making TRXS the first U.S.-listed fund offering staked TRX exposure.

Citi, a major U.S. bank, plans to offer instant cross-border payments to Japanese corporate clients using tokenized deposits, allowing companies to move money internationally through blockchain-based representations of bank deposits outside traditional banking hours, according to Nikkei.
The move would make Citi the first foreign bank to enter Japan’s tokenized-deposit payments market, with the service aimed at reducing the delays associated with conventional international bank transfers.

DeFi Development Corp., a Nasdaq-listed Solana treasury company, closed an $11M offering of CHAD, a Variable Rate Series C perpetual preferred stock designed to raise permanent capital for additional SOL purchases without issuing common shares.
CHAD carries an initial 13% annual dividend rate, equivalent to an approximately 16.25% initial effective yield at the offering price, with its first regular dividend payment scheduled for Oct. 1.
The Strategy-style financing instrument is backed by DeFi Development’s Solana-focused treasury strategy, with the company currently holding approximately 2.33M SOL and SOL equivalents and using SOL staking and validator yield to support its “Digital Credit” model.

Robinhood, a U.S. brokerage and trading platform has partnered with Crypto.com and OG.com to expand its prediction-markets business, with some event contracts routed to OG.com while Robinhood also takes equity stakes in both companies.
The rollout starts with football-related contracts ahead of the 2026 NFL season, while Robinhood will continue routing other prediction-market trades to Kalshi, ForecastEX and Rothera; its prediction-markets business generated about $156M in Q2 revenue from 13.6B event contracts.

Hyperliquid, a decentralized derivatives platform, saw total open interest rise to $14.3B, within 3% of its pre-crash level from Oct. 9, 2025, while HYPE reached a record $88 and a market cap near $20B.
Recent growth has increasingly come from Hyperliquid’s core crypto markets rather than HIP-3 builder markets. The core venue directs about 97% of trading fees into HYPE buybacks, while HIP-3 builders can retain up to half of the fees they generate.

Strive, a publicly traded bitcoin treasury company, acquired 1,375 BTC for approximately $109M at an average price of $79,281, increasing its total holdings to 24,531 BTC.
About 70% of the capital Strive raised during the week came from its SATA perpetual preferred stock, which reached nearly $999M in notional value outstanding, with CEO Matt Cole commenting that it’s “Time to break the billion-dollar wall.”

This Week's Calendar

This week's macro and crypto calendar, part 1.

This week's macro and crypto calendar, part 2.

Charts of the Day

Figure 1. Block Scholes BTC Risk-Appetite Index (white, left-hand axis) and BTC spot price (orange, right-hand axis).

Figure 2. Block Scholes ETH Risk-Appetite Index (white, left-hand axis) and ETH spot price (purple, right-hand axis).

Figure 3. BTC at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 4. ETH at-the-money implied volatility across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 5. BTC 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Figure 6. ETH 25-delta put-call skew ratio across selected tenors. Source: Deribit, Block Scholes.

Block Scholes is an FCA-regulated institutional crypto derivatives analytics platform. Live data, IV surfaces, and backtesting available via blockscholes.com.