Tom Lee's Bitmine has made another big move recently—$131 million directly spent to scoop up ETH. That number alone says a lot.

Let’s do the math. For these institutions, $131 million might just be a rounding error in a quarterly budget. But for ordinary investors? That’s a ceiling most people will never even get close to in a lifetime. More importantly, purchases of this scale are hardly just for short-term trading profits.

Every time there’s such a large buy-in, a chunk of ETH available for free trading in the market gets locked up. The circulating supply shrinks, and the pricing power shifts. When one entity accumulates enough holdings, its influence on the market grows exponentially. At that point, a single tweet from them could outweigh the voices of ten thousand retail investors.

A lot of times, when you see headlines everywhere saying "institution increases holdings again,"