Should BMNR Buy Back Shares?!

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]BMR and Ethereum have largely been an underwhelming story for the start of 2026. And we're going to talk a little bit about some positive momentum on the regulatory front. We're going to talk about more accumulation and we're going to talk a little bit about the ecosystem and the macro. But overall, both the price and the sentiment are at near lows and that is really reflecting into some of the actions that you're going to see with regards to the news for BMR. This is your BMR weekly update every Saturday, rain or shine. Without further ado, let's jump right in.

[00:00:36]So, let me start off first and foremost talking a little bit about the BMR price as well as Ethereum's price and comparing that to get an accurate understanding of the market cap to the net asset value. BMR was down about 2% over the past week, trading for $18.83 83 cents as of this recording on Saturday, May 23rd. If you look on a monthly view, it's down about 16%.

[00:01:03]Three-month view is down about 3%. So, pretty flat from there, but it did give up a lot of the gains that we were having. As you remember, Ethereum hit 2,300 and Ethereum as well is giving up those gains as well. So, as we said, BMR is down about 2% over this past week.

[00:01:21]Well, Ethereum is down almost 9% over this past week and so we are getting closer to a parody of the net asset value relative to the market cap being closer to one. Now, one thing to keep in mind is that Ethereum lost a lot of those gains really after the market had closed. So, we'll see how BMR trades on Monday, but Ethereum is 24 hours, and BMR is, of course, Monday through Friday from 9:30 to 4 p.m. Now, BMR is still trading at a discount relative to the assets they hold. But if we look at the price action here for Ethereum, you're going to see a lot of red. And we did bottom here around February, where we traded for $1,800 for one Ethereum token. And as I mentioned, we were trading as high as 23 to even 2400 over the past couple weeks. and we've given up those gains and we're back down to $2,000 per token from Ethereum. Now, there's a bunch of pieces here that I'll talk about, but really this is an underwhelming trend overall, especially considering that the rest of the market is flying high on AI names in general.

[00:02:26]The market focus has not been on Ethereum or Bitcoin or cryptocurrency in general. we are largely in a crypto winter and I think that's the overwhelming sentiment and you're going to see that with the price action being reflective. So let's talk a little bit about adoption overall and adoption largely is a story of stable coins and tokenization those are the two big pieces here with aentic AI coming in recently as a third big pillar of the underlying fundamental valuation of ethereum blockchain. So here BMR Bulls highlights that Ethereum is second to none in stable coin usage. Over the past five years, the top net change in supply by absolute value is $122 billion for Ethereum, followed by $62 billion in Tron as the second largest chain. BMR Bulls here said this week that now the Trump administration is opening to push stable coin adoption and global dollar dominance through crypto rails. And the thing to also keep in mind is that the stable coin supply is now also hitting new all-time highs. And this is going up and to the right above $323 billion. BMR Bulls here highlights while most people focus only on price, the underlying dollar liquidity moving onchain keeps accelerating. New all-time highs pretty much weekly for stable coin supply. $323 billion worth market cap. Stable coins are becoming the foundation for tokenized assets, payments, and global digital dollar adoption. So, of course, if you saw Ethereum's price was up and to the right, all of these numbers would make sense. But you see Ethereum's numbers being at lows, then all of a sudden, these ecosystem adoption metrics don't make sense. And that's one of the reasons why I do these videos is to show you the other side of the equation in addition to just showing you the price.

[00:04:18]Tokenization is really the other part of the puzzle here. So here you have Cody who highlights tokenized real world assets past $65 billion up 44% year to date and Ethereum still leads the way with about onethird of all tokenized real world assets going through the Ethereum chain. You also have some other chains here that you might have heard of, maybe you haven't yet, but essentially Ethereum is a big player in tokenization. It's the single biggest player and that is only going to get larger. Now, here's the other thing that was a little bit baffling to me is that Ethereum staking ratio reached a high of 32.4%.

[00:04:58]And basically here that means that onethird of all the Ethereum out there roughly is locked up. It's staked and and by being staked, it's off the market. So, it's not being sold. This normally would create a supply demand imbalance that favors the demand side.

[00:05:15]The price would go up as a result of this. And yet we still have continued selling pressure on Ethereum despite being at the lows. And we don't have nearly enough buying pressure to drag the price upwards regardless of having so much supply locked up and more so every single week with BMR and others buying up existing supply and then locking it up for the staking rewards.

[00:05:38]So, I think that's one of the pieces of the puzzle here that doesn't really make sense in the short term because the buying demand is so low right now, but I think that's going to change eventually.

[00:05:49]Uh, so here you had this post by BMR Bulls. Um, this is Eric Trump here who's talking in this interview talking about tokenization. And we can play this clip.

[00:05:57]It's just under two minutes. and he's talking about how tokenization is essentially going to bring a wave of new capital to Ethereum over the next decade because you can tokenize just about anything.

[00:06:08]>> Well, Eric, you said you were on the first yard line when it comes to uh Bitcoin and crypto in this entire space.

[00:06:14]How do you see it for instance like reshaping real estate? Do you see the tokenization of everything or what do you see the next five years?

[00:06:21]>> Tokenization of everything in time. I mean, it might might not all happen in the next five years, but listen, we're staying in Trump Tower, right? Very famous building. Probably everybody on earth has heard of Trump Towers >> in some way, shape or form.

[00:06:31]>> You know, why is it if I want to put financing on this building? Why is it if I want to go take a loan, you know, I probably have ability to go to seven different banks that have the capability of doing a project like this. Why can't I go out to tens of millions of people around the world who adore Trump, >> adore our name >> and offer it to them and say, "Listen, you know, we're going to put uh, you know, $500 million of financing on Trump Tower. Who wants a part of it?" You raise the money and guess what? All these people, this incredible group of people, all have a small share, a couple shares, couple tokens of Trump Tower.

[00:06:59]Like, that's a beautiful console. If Taylor Swift puts out a new album, you know, why can't she go and why can't she sell that album and and otherwise tokenize and monetize that album and have people bet on the the success of of their fan of of of whoever they love, whoever they aspire to be. You're going to have tokenized movies. You're going to have tokenized artists. You're going to have tokenized real estate. You're going to have tokenized commodities. you know, there there's virtually nothing.

[00:07:22]You're gonna have tokenized art. You know, guess what? You want to own the uh you know, the greatest painting um ever.

[00:07:29]Guess what? You can't afford the $200 million price tag, but you can own, you know, 110,000th of that painting or 1/100,000th of that painting. And and you can, you know, you can get the the accretion of the value if it goes up.

[00:07:42]And, you know, maybe if it goes down, you I think everything should be tokenized. You're seeing companies tokenized. You're seeing stocks tokenized. um it's coming and it's right around the corner. It will give great accessibility to people who would otherwise never be able to access certain financial markets and certain asset classes for the first time. Um once again providing financial freedom that just doesn't exist in in today's economy.

[00:08:04]I think that's very clear-cut and we've talked at length about tokenization and I've shared my thoughts there around this democratization of access around the added liquidity that it provides around the fact that you can now have so much more exposure to asset classes that were historically limited to just a small number of well- capitalized institutions. Now you can actually have your everyday retail investor have exposure to those asset classes. And for those reasons, it's going to be a very popular product offering. Whether it's going to be real estate or music or art, I'm not sure, but it's going to have adoption, especially because there is a serious demand for retail investors to have more alpha, to have more exposure to things that are just not liquid markets right now in the current system.

[00:08:54]Let me talk a little bit about the macro and then I want to jump into some specifics around BMR. So we had here some news that the SEC approves NASDAQ Bitcoin index options trading and we also had a news around the SEC to release an innovation exemption for tokenized stocks which will pave the path for trading digital versions of securities. So, this was on May 18th, and here the details include that the SEC is now leaning towards allowing the trading of tokenized assets, that these assets would be tradable on a decentralized crypto platform, and that this move could reshape the landscape of the American stock market in one of the biggest shifts towards crypto infrastructure out there. Now, a few days later, the SEC said, "Hey, we're actually going to put the pause on this.

[00:09:44]We're just going to delay the timeline a bit uh as we do more research. So, we're going to see where we end up with this after the SEC has done further review if this is still front of mind. But, it's really interesting that they're thinking about this and going actively in this direction. And as we know, many of the administrations uh under this presidency are very crypto friendly, right? So, we're seeing movement on that front as well. Now, Tom Lee made this thread early this week saying, "Hey, if one is wondering why Ethereum has been under selling pressure, uh to me, rising oil prices is the biggest headwind because it has an inverse correlation to ETH."

[00:10:22]And this is the highest it's ever been.

[00:10:24]So, you can see this chart, Ethereum inverse correlation is the highest ever here. And Tom goes on to say that as oil prices have risen, ETH prices have fallen. And this obviously holds true on the reverse. As oil prices fall, ETH prices rise. And Tom here says this is short-term tactical noise. The bigger driver for Ethereum is tokenization and eneic AI. Now, let me provide my two cents. The only correlation between them is that Ethereum is a risk-on asset and oil is essentially something that's very closely tied to geopolitics. So, if you're going to have um the prospect of a global war, let's say, or the delays in shipping lines for oil, then obviously the market as a whole would go risk off and as a result would sell Ethereum or Bitcoin or any other small cap with high beta name out there because they're risk-on assets. And so to that degree, I 1,000% agree that Ethereum and oil are inversely correlated just because of what they stand for from an investor sentiment perspective, not not necessarily as a result of any inherent characteristic that they may have in isolation. Uh Tom here highlighted the April FOMC minutes highlight why ETH is inversely correlated to oil at the moment. FOMC spoke in need of firming policy if inflation is over 2%. Higher oil is pushing up inflation. Thus, higher oil equals a higher probability of Fed hikes. And I mean, we've been talking about this on the macro level. Like, you don't need to be a genius to understand that if the underlying economy is worse, then the Fed is going to act appropriately from a rate perspective, right? Whether they provide rate cuts or I mean, right now, the market is even looking at a potential rate hike. That is something to be determined by in part how long this geopolitical conflict lasts. If the conflict is over immediately, then obviously that's a different story than if it escalates even further than this. We're going to have a much different rate environment.

[00:12:24]That's going to affect companies like SoFi. It's going to affect all these high beta names. It's definitely going to affect Ethereum and as a result, it's going to affect BMR as well. So the rate environment is very emblematic from a macro perspective of what type of market do we end up getting. Now speaking of that, Kevin Worsh was sworn in as the new Fed chair replacing JP Pal. Uh Worsh is pro crypto. So here you have Grock responses who saying he has over $100 million in digital asset investments including Bitcoin related projects. Uh Wars has publicly called Bitcoin quote the new gold for anyone under 40 years old and he supports incorporating digital assets into US finance marking a notable policy shift at the central bank. So Worsh is bullish on cryptocurrency but we're going to see what his stance is in the short term with regards to the macro because if we do get one rate cut then it's off to the races but if we get one rate hike then it's actually going to be much more uh drastic than what we have right now. The market is of course uh expecting right now nothing to happen for rates to be kept stable but I hear arguments on both sides around having one cut or having one hike and we don't know what it's going to end up being until the time comes. Uh we also saw this eight Ethereum Foundation leaders and researchers have resigned in 2026. So not sure what uh the rationale here is.

[00:13:57]Uh but this user this highest voted comment said their road map and goal was to eventually shrink the foundation and dissolve it as Ethereum becomes its own ecosystem which is not in need of them.

[00:14:08]It is actually doing exactly what they have stated they would do. So again without reading too much into this personally I'm not really panicked or concerned with anything here. It's just something to call out. Uh we also did get this news. Harvard has sold off its entire $87 million Ethereum stake just one quarter after buying it. I don't know what this is about. Maybe they saw the price and they didn't like it. Maybe they think that it's not going to be a performer over the long term. I'm not sure. I don't want to hyperfocus on one buyer or one seller specifically. But I did highlight in the past how Harvard had bought Ethereum and now I'm also highlighting how Harvard has sold Ethereum. I'm not reading in between the lines at all there. Let me jump into some BMR specific news here. So the Monday update May 18th we saw 13.1 billion in total crypto plus moonshots $5.27 million ETH $683 million worth of cash. Let's jump into this update. So here Bminar talked a little bit about clarity with a full Senate vote later this year and how clarity is beneficial to the bullcase for Ethereum. Uh here's what we really care about. Over the past week, we acquired 71,000 ETH tokens with the recent pullback below 2200 as an attractive opportunity.

[00:15:33]Bit mine is expected to reach the alchemy of 5% somewhere in 2026. So, this is interesting because two weeks ago, they said, "We're actually going to slow down our purchases so that we could reach 5% by the end of 2026." And what happened was Ethereum saw a dip in the price and now they're actually buying the dip in a bigger way. And we're going to see when they buy the remaining, you know, 700 800,000 Ethereum that they have uh left over to buy. But these weeks are very interesting, right?

[00:16:03]Because on one hand, they want to reduce the amount of purchases that they're making. On the other hand, the market is just giving them a great dip buying opportunity right now. Now, if we scroll down, we can see the staked amount by week. Nothing additional was actually staked last week. They say here, as of May 17th, which is last weekend, Bitmine total Ethereum staked stands at the exact at the exact same figure that they had over the past two weeks. So, uh interesting there because we saw a big acceleration in the staking here in the three weeks prior from 3.3 to 3.7 to 4.3 to 4.6. 7 and now it seems as though they're taking a little bit of a breather. They've done this in the past before. So you can see here um you know 3-w week breather, two weeks, uh 6 weeks, two weeks. Uh this happens from time to time. I'm not reading too much into that specifically. Okay, so that's our BMR update for the week. And BMR bulls here highlights this is brutal.

[00:16:58]BMR is now trading below 0.9 MNAV. We do not want this to decouple even more.

[00:17:05]It's actually good that the Ethereum price is now lower. So, the Ethereum price was about 2100 at the time of this post. It's now 2,000. And BMR's price was 18.55 at the time of this post. It's now 18.83.

[00:17:20]So, this ratio has gotten much better than what this post suggests when this post was made, but it's still underneath the one MNAB. It's it's probably like 0.95 right now. Maybe 0.96, but uh definitely not as low as 0.9, but also definitely not as high as above one. So, we're going to see how this continues to trade relative to Ethereum. But BMR Bulls highlights an important question.

[00:17:44]At what point does buying back shares become more attractive than buying more Ethereum? Now, buying back shares is an interesting proposition because they highlighted this to authorize buybacks of $4 billion. And of course, that would be a huge chunk if that actually were to happen. You know, the hypothesis really with BMR is for them to race to get to the 5% alchemy as fast as possible. And then only once they've done that do they then buy back shares with the staking rewards and lower their float in that manner to optimize their composition.

[00:18:17]So, it's dilute, dilute, dilute so that we can accumulate fast and then have the staking rewards so that you can shrink the amount of outstanding shares. That's in a market that's cooperative. In a market that's not cooperative, like BMRs is highlighting, well, maybe it makes sense to to buy back some of those shares a little bit sooner because you're trading at a deep discount here to the assets that you have on hand. Uh, so here I wanted to also throw this up.

[00:18:46]This is the institutional ownership. I talked about this a little bit last week, but this is just a visualization here of the institutions that are all increasing their accumulation of Bitmine. We also saw here Bitminar is going to be added to the Russell 1000 index on the 26th of June 2026. This was actually just announced very recently over the past uh day or so. In addition, Sharlink SBET will also be added to the Russell 2000 index on the exact same day. Mario here says the floodgates, the passive inflows are moving. So, I mean, this also makes sense, right? Whenever you're added to an index, all the passive money that's tracking that index is now forced to buy some BMR, and that's going to happen starting in June.

[00:19:30]Finally, on the regulatory front, we did get this post here from Gemini that says the Senate is expected to hold a floor vote on the Clarity Act within 30 days.

[00:19:40]And we also got this from Kenny. Same thing. It's just the actual document here. So, within the next 30 days is when we can expect the Senate to get a move on on the clarity. Now, we know this passed the Senate Banking Committee. We want this to pass the full Senate vote so that we can actually get something sooner rather than later. Um, obviously it has to match up the Congress version and then taken to the president's desk for a signature. And we didn't get any other more granular dates other than that post where it said, "Hey, it's going to be within the next 30 days or so." So, the timeline that we're working with is sometime in June, this is going to happen. And when that does happen, well, we can expect some more movement on the Ethereum ecosystem.

[00:20:20]Overall, this week was a pretty quiet week for BMR. Uh and for Ethereum, we did close a little bit of the gap towards that discount to premium because we were seriously trading at a big big discount there of 0.9. Uh we're going to see where this trades. Like I said, the price action is underwhelming, but the underlying ecosystem activity is promised. Of course, clarity moving faster is a big piece there. Uh but overall, it's business as usual for them to accumulate more Ethereum. And uh I mean, I don't love the price either. I'm just reporting on what I'm seeing with regards to the catalyst out there and with regards to the valuation thesis of where this thing should be relative to what it's doing and what the ecosystem is doing in terms of adoption. Hope you enjoyed these videos and hope you're enjoying the consistency of these videos week in week out whether we have a lot of news or whether we have a small amount or whether it's a more quiet week. Either way, I'll be covering BMR on a weekly basis. So definitely subscribe to the channel if you haven't done so already. Share this video out if you found value from it. Thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next one.