Tom Lee, founding father of Fundstrat and Chairman of ether (ETH) treasury firm Bitmine Immersion Applied sciences, has misplaced extra on ETH utilizing different folks’s cash than the $8 billion price of losses suffered by FTX clients.
With 4,422,659 ETH bought at a mean $3,850 apiece, Lee’s firm raised capital to purchase the asset at over $2,000 extra per coin than at the moment’s value.
Because of this, he’s misplaced $8.8 billion of his firm’s property.
Tom Lee’s loss on ETH with different folks’s cash is now greater than the losses incurred by customers within the FTX collapse
— Sisyphus (@0xSisyphus) February 23, 2026
At time of writing, ETH is buying and selling at $1,843, down 60% over the previous six months alone. Sadly, Bitmine Immersion has been shopping for tons of ETH over that bearish interval — rising losses for its traders at an alarming price.
Over the previous six months, as ETH was declining 60%, Bitmine Immersion purchased an additional 2,708,760 ETH.
These progressively disastrous additions elevated the corporate’s losses from $4.8 billion to $8.8 billion.
Bitmine Immersion misplaced $8.8 billion by shopping for ETH
It’s not notably outstanding for digital asset treasury (DAT) corporations to have declined in worth.
The Wall Avenue fad, which peaked in early summer time 2025, was to overpay for leverage within the hope that the mania would enhance to much more exuberant heights, or that the corporate might persuade bond traders or different capital allocators to supply it much more leverage.
Within the distant future, all DATs centered on the in the end restricted provide of bitcoin (BTC) or ETH as another excuse to spend money on these leveraged acquisition methods, although their efforts to nook the market often fizzled inside single digit percentages of the excellent provide of these property.
What began as modest premiums of some share factors rapidly ballooned into inventory debuts rallying to 23x the worth of their crypto holdings.
That when-23x overvalued inventory, like many comparable treasury shares, fell 98% by November from its Might peak, and is now down over 99%.
Bitmine Immersion is down 88% from its July 2025 excessive. It’s misplaced over $600 million on its ETH holdings prior to now week.
Inside 5 months of its June 3, 2025 peak, Lee’s firm had shed 80% of its inventory worth. By February 5 of this yr, Lee’s ETH treasury had misplaced $8 billion for traders, and that loss prolonged to as a lot as $9 billion intraday this morning.
