The sales, conducted over-the-counter rather than on public exchanges, span three separate transactions beginning in March 2026. The Foundation says the proceeds will fund day-to-day operations, protocol research and development, ecosystem grants, and community programs. Bitmine (NYSE: BMNR), led by Tom Lee as Chairman and CIO and co-founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors, has been building what analysts describe as the largest known single corporate holding of ether in existence. The firm's approach draws direct comparisons to MicroStrategy's Bitcoin treasury playbook and is widely described in the industry as the "Strategy of Ethereum."

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Transaction Breakdown

The first deal, completed in March 2026, involved 5,000 ETH sold at an average price of approximately $2,043 per token, yielding around $10.2 million. A second transaction on April 24 covered 10,000 ETH at roughly $2,387 apiece, bringing in close to $23.9 million. A third transaction in late April or early May pushed the running total to $47 million, implying an additional transfer of somewhere between 5,000 and 6,000 ETH at prices in the $2,300 to $2,600 range. The precise terms of the third deal had not been independently verified beyond The Block's initial reporting at time of publication.

By conducting all three sales OTC, the Foundation avoids placing large sell orders on open markets. In a network where staking rewards and validator economics are denominated in ETH, large spot sales that suppress token prices can affect the long-term security and incentive structure of the network.

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Who Is Bitmine and Why Is It Buying?

Bitmine pivoted away from Bitcoin mining in mid-2025 and reoriented its entire corporate strategy around accumulating ether. The firm has leaned publicly into comparisons with MicroStrategy's Bitcoin treasury playbook, a framing widely circulated in the industry as the "Strategy of Ethereum." As of late April 2026, Bitmine holds approximately 5.08 million ETH, representing roughly 4.2 percent of Ethereum's total circulating supply, according to CoinDesk.

The company has staked about 3.7 million of those tokens through its institutional staking platform, Mavan, launched in March 2026. That staking position generates an estimated $264 million in annualised yield. Bitmine has publicly stated a target of accumulating 6 million ETH, a strategy Lee calls the "Alchemy of 5 percent," according to CoinDesk, premised on concentrating enough supply to create a structural scarcity floor.

Lee has described ether as "the best 'war-time store of value,'" citing Wall Street's growing interest in tokenising real-world assets on public blockchains and the rising demand for neutral infrastructure from AI agent systems as two structural tailwinds for the network.

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The Foundation's Financial Position

The Ethereum Foundation published its first formal treasury policy in June 2025, capping annual operational spending at 15 percent of treasury value and requiring the organisation to maintain a 2.5-year operating buffer. On-chain analytics firm Arkham Intelligence flagged in late April 2026 that, at current spending rates, the Foundation's remaining ETH reserves of roughly 92,548 tokens (worth approximately $215 million) could be drawn down to zero by 2027.

Prior EF sales have drawn significant community backlash, with some members treating each transaction as a betrayal, accompanied by price chart volatility and sharp reactions across crypto social media. The OTC structure of the Bitmine deals is partly designed to sidestep that dynamic by avoiding visible open-market sell pressure. Beyond the Bitmine transactions, the Foundation has also converted 5,000 ETH to stablecoins via CoWSwap using a time-weighted average price order, adding to the total volume of ETH exiting the treasury.

To reduce dependence on asset sales, the Foundation committed to staking 70,000 ETH in February 2026, a position that generates an estimated $5.4 million in annual yield at a 3 percent rate. That staking income offsets only a portion of the Foundation's operating costs, suggesting that direct asset liquidation, including these OTC deals, remains part of the funding mix.

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What This Means Outside the United States

The practical stakes of Foundation funding extend well beyond Silicon Valley or Western Europe. India leads global crypto adoption for the second consecutive year, according to the 2026 Global Crypto Adoption Index, and has been the largest source of new crypto developers globally since 2023, with more than 17 million developers on GitHub. The Ethereum Foundation is hosting Devcon 8 in Mumbai from November 3 to 6, 2026. Grant programs and developer funding cited as intended uses of the OTC sale proceeds flow directly to builder communities across South Asia, including Pakistan, which featured prominently in 2025 APAC adoption data alongside India and Vietnam, particularly in decentralised finance participation.

In Sub-Saharan Africa, the picture is different but equally concrete. The region recorded stablecoin volume growth above 180 percent year on year, with the bulk of that activity running on Ethereum-based assets such as USDC and USDT. Nigeria alone received more than $30 billion through decentralised finance services, according to available reporting.

Remittance fees in the region average 7.9 percent on a $200 transfer; Ethereum-based stablecoin rails are cutting those costs by as much as 85 percent in some corridors.

Sustained Foundation funding, and the avoidance of the market disruption that large open-market ETH sales would create, helps protect the continued development of the infrastructure that users across the region depend on for basic financial services.

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What to Watch

Two concerns merit close monitoring. First, Bitmine's growing share of circulating ETH supply raises legitimate questions about concentration risk in a network whose core value proposition is decentralisation. Second, on-chain projections suggest the Foundation's treasury could face serious strain as soon as 2027, regardless of staking yield. If grant budgets tighten, the emerging-market developer communities that have become increasingly central to Ethereum's builder ecosystem may feel the effects first.

No further transactions between the Foundation and Bitmine, or with other counterparties, have been publicly announced as of publication.