Ethereum’s largest DAT company, BitMine, has released its financial report—showing a first-quarter loss of $3.8 billion......

Bitmine, just by its name, you can tell what it is: it was originally a Bitcoin mining company. In April last year, around the same period, it pivoted to become an ETH treasury company—i.e., a DAT (Digital Assets Treasury). Back then, in the U.S. stock market and the crypto circle, a DAT wave had just taken off.
Six months after the transformation, Bitmine issued twice as many shares and raised roughly $10 billion. To date, it has gradually bought 4.87 million ETH, about 4.039% of all ETH, making it the real number one big brother in the ETH leaderboard. Its holdings are 6 times those of the second-place Sharplink (SBET).
So Bitmine became the second-largest DAT company after MicroStrategy.
To be clear, did Bitmine make money now? It actually did—because its average cost basis for the ETH it holds is only around 2206, and it has just broken even.
Then why does the financial report show a loss? Actually, it’s because ETH’s performance in the first quarter was too weak, making the books look very ugly in that quarter.
There’s also an interesting data point in the report: this quarter’s general and administrative expenses (G&A) are $75 million, up 100 times from $750k in the same period last year. It seems that doing ETH “CX ground promotion” also costs more than simply running a mining company 👀
Currently, Bitmine’s main earnings come from ETH staking rewards—about 3% points a year in ETH-denominated dividend-like payouts. Bitcoin mining was long left behind.
Besides that, Bitmine also has nearly $900 million in cash and several hundred million dollars’ worth of equity in a few companies. CEO Tom Lee is still blindly calling bullish bets.
A company of the same type, SBET, hasn’t released its first-quarter financial report yet, but even last year’s full-year report was very ugly. Its net loss was also $735 million—again due to ETH’s price crash.
With this kind of company, it’s too deeply tied to crypto asset prices. They can be seen as crypto assets equivalent to 1.5x leverage. And there’s a major paradox: a DAT company’s crypto assets are hard to liquidate. Once they sell to liquidate, market confidence will be severely hit, creating a “death spiral” path.
So, when you come to crypto, everyone is firing the arrow with no way back!