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BitMine Files for $300M Preferred Stock Offering at 9.5% Yield to Expand ETH Treasury

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BitMine Immersion Technologies filed a 424B5 prospectus supplement to raise up to $300 million through Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock at a 9.5% cumulative dividend — applying Strategy’s STRC capital-markets playbook to a corporate Ethereum treasury sitting on $9.2 billion in unrealized losses.

BitMine Immersion Technologies (NYSE: BMNR) filed a preliminary prospectus with the SEC on Wednesday to raise up to $300 million through a new class of preferred stock carrying a 9.5% cumulative annual dividend paid weekly in cash.

The structure mirrors the preferred-dividend instrument Strategy pioneered for Bitcoin, applied this time to a corporate Ethereum treasury that now holds 4.5% of the coin’s circulating supply.

The prospectus supplement, filed June 3 under accession number 0001493152-26-027136 on the SEC’s EDGAR system, covers up to 3 million shares of Series A Perpetual Preferred Stock at a $100 stated value per share. The shares are expected to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker BMNP within 30 days of first issuance. Moelis & Company and Cantor are joint lead bookrunners.

The BMNP Instrument

The preferred stock is non-convertible. It does not give holders equity in the company. The 9.5% annual dividend obligation accrues on a $100 face value and compounds if unpaid. Dividends carry a default penalty of the regular rate plus 5 basis points per week, capped at 15%.

BitMine can call the shares at 110% of stated value in the first 18 months, at 105% between 18 months and three years, and at par thereafter. Holders receive repurchase rights if certain fundamental corporate changes occur.

Strategy’s comparable instrument, STRC, carries an 11.5% annual dividend and has raised roughly $10.5 billion since its July 2025 IPO. Strive and Metaplanet have issued similar structures. BitMine, led by Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee, is now applying the same capital-markets template to the Ethereum side of the corporate-treasury trade.

BitMine’s ETH Holdings and the Paper-Loss Figure

BitMine holds 5,416,901 ETH, the largest corporate Ethereum position tracked by CoinGecko. At the current price of roughly $1,773, those tokens are worth approximately $9.6 billion, accounting for about 4.5% of Ethereum’s circulating supply of 120.7 million coins.

The company’s total invested cost in ETH stands at $18.83 billion, per the prospectus. That puts the unrealized loss at approximately $9.2 billion, according to the prospectus. ETH hit an all-time high of $4,946 in August 2025 and has since declined about 64%.

BitMine’s treasury also includes 203 BTC, a $200 million stake in Beast Industries, a $97 million stake in Eightco Holdings (Nasdaq: ORBS), and $446 million in cash, bringing total treasury assets to roughly $12.3 billion as of May 26, per the company’s June 2 investor presentation filed as an 8-K.

MAVAN Yield vs. Dividend Obligation

A 9.5% annual dividend on $300 million equals roughly $28.5 million per year. BitMine says it intends to fund that obligation primarily through staking yields from its MAVAN validator platform, which manages the bulk of its ETH holdings.

The prospectus does not specify MAVAN’s current yield rate. Ethereum staking yields on the network currently run below the 9.5% BMNP dividend rate, which means BitMine may need price appreciation or additional staking scale to fully cover the obligation without drawing on cash reserves.

That gap between actual staking yield and the committed dividend is the key structural tension the BMNP offering presents to prospective investors.

Schiff’s Critique

Peter Schiff, the gold advocate and longtime crypto critic, argued on X that raising capital at a 9.5% yield obligation to purchase more Ethereum is unlikely to succeed given the asset’s steep price decline.

Schiff has applied a similar critique to Strategy’s STRC instrument, warning of a potential death-spiral dynamic in which declining asset prices force issuers to offer progressively higher yields to attract investors, compounding the cost burden on an already loss-heavy treasury.

BMNR Common Stock and the Capital-Structure Logic

BMNR common stock has fallen roughly 50% from recent highs. That makes equity-based capital raises expensive in dilution terms. The preferred structure addresses that: BitMine takes in dollar-denominated capital at a fixed yield rate, without issuing common shares.

Strategy’s STRC program demonstrated how this structure can generate capital at scale even against a volatile underlying asset — it raised $10.5 billion over roughly 10 months. Whether the same logic holds for Ethereum, which carries different staking-yield economics, a deeper recent price decline, and a $9.2 billion hole in invested cost, is the question the BMNP offering puts to the market.

The prospectus does not specify a closing date for the offering.

Here’s what could happen if bitcoin breaks below $60,000

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Bitcoin continues to lose ground and the price is fast closing on $60,000 amid record ETF outflows.

The $60,000 level has been widely cited by analysts as a major support, below which the selloff could get even uglier.

Jean-David Péquignot, the chief commercial officer at leading crypto options exchange Deribit said that price is critical not just because it’s a round-number psychological level. More importantly, it’s a structural threshold with real consequences for institutions and derivatives market participants.

The cost basis problem

According to Péquignot, a significant chunk of institutional money — comprising ETF buyers, large holders and short-term speculators — bought bitcoin at prices between $60,000 and $67,000 over the past year.

With the largest cryptocurrency now trading within that range, these buyers are sitting at or near their cost basis, essentially at break-even. If prices drop further, unrealized or paper losses will mount and holding becomes expensive, especially when AI stocks and other parts of the traditional market are rallying like there is no tomorrow.

“As price undercuts their cost basis, the resulting unrealized losses may incentivize rushed selling, especially as the opportunity cost of holding BTC rises against a surging AI equity sector,” he said.

Michael Saylor, the high-profile executive chairman of Strategy (MSTR), the largest publicly traded bitcoin holder, also blamed capital rotation for recent BTC losses.

The derivatives problem

Things become mechanical after that.

On Deribit, there is over $1.2 billion in notional open interest sitting at the $60,000 strike put options, which pay out if prices fall below that level. Investors have bought these as a hedge against a protracted selloff.

The problem, however, is that market makers, who are on the opposite side of the investors, are now short puts, or more precisely, “short gamma.”

So, as BTC nears $60,000, market makers and dealers will be forced to sell spot BTC or futures to balance their books. Other things being equal, this hedging can accelerate the selloff, turning an orderly decline into a chaotic one, Péquignot said.

He also pointed out that there are too many leveraged longs in the system, and a break below $60,000 could lead to more liquidations, adding to downside momentum.

“With leverage still not fully flushed from the system, a break of $60K could rapidly worsen collateral metrics, triggering a cascading wave of automated long liquidations,” he said.

Note that billions of dollars of leveraged longs, or bullish plays tied to BTC and other tokens, have already been liquidated this week.

US Senators Urge Regulators to Clarify Crypto Capital Rules

A group of Senate Republicans has urged US financial regulators to clarify the capital standards for companies engaged in crypto activities.

Senator Cynthia Lummis said on Thursday that she led the group in sending a letter on May 27 to Federal Reserve Vice Chair for Supervision Michelle Bowman, Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Chairman Travis Hill, and Comptroller of the Currency Jonathan Gould.

The letter commended the agencies’ guidance in March that clarified the capital treatment of tokenized securities, but urged them “to build on that progress to move towards a clear and fair capital treatment for on-balance sheet treatment of digital assets.”

Current international standards for capitalizing crypto holdings require banks to hold a greater value of reserve assets compared to the value of their digital asset holdings, which the Senators said was essentially a “de facto ban” on banks holding crypto.

The letter comes as senators are preparing to act on a bill, dubbed the CLARITY Act, that would outline how federal agencies will regulate crypto. The current version of the bill allows banks to use digital assets and blockchain for activities such as payments, lending, custody and trading.

Senate leaders are pushing to pass the bill ahead of the midterms in November, as the legislation risks having to be reintroduced in the next session of Congress if it fails to pass ahead of the elections.

Source: Cynthia Lummis

The group took issue with the Basel Committee on Bank Supervision’s longstanding standards that assigned a 1,250% risk weight to crypto, which they said was “not derived from a calibrated assessment of the actual risk profile of digital assets.”

“Any proposed capital treatment of on-balance sheet digital asset activities should accurately reflect the opportunities and risks of digital assets — and be based on, to the extent possible, a technology-neutral approach that gives banks the authority to participate meaningfully in digital asset markets,” the group said.

Related: Debate on CLARITY Act continues this week as US Senate returns

They added that crypto legislation under consideration in the Senate would “undoubtedly require capital guidance” and urged regulators to begin work on a new capital framework for crypto.

Senators Dan Sullivan, Bill Hagerty, Bernie Moreno, Ted Budd and Jon Husted also signed the letter.

Debate on the Senate’s crypto bill is slated to resume this week after the Senate returned from recess. The legislation lays out how the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission will regulate crypto markets and companies.

The Senate Banking and Agriculture Committees have passed their own versions of the bill addressing securities and commodities, but the full Senate will need to reconcile the different bills.

Other issues raised by lawmakers, including stablecoins, ethics and crypto developers, will also need to be addressed in the bill if it is to receive the 60 votes needed to pass the Senate without lengthy debate that could leave the bill stalled indefinitely.

Magazine: Will the CLARITY Act be good — or bad — for DeFi?

Bitcoin could fall to $60,000, Zcash plunges 37%

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Forward Industries deposited 455,784 SOL worth roughly $31.87 million to Coinbase Prime on Friday after a month of dormancy, according to onchain tracker Lookonchain.

The transfer is the first sizeable movement from the company’s treasury wallets in more than four weeks and lands in the middle of a sharp Solana drawdown that has pushed the token down 18.5% on the week.

The company launched its Solana treasury strategy in September 2025, spending roughly $1.59 billion to accumulate 6.83 million SOL at an average price of $232.08 per token. Solana is now trading at $66.51, which puts those same holdings at $458.6 million.

The position is currently around $1.13 billion underwater, a more than 70% paper loss per token.

A deposit to Coinbase Prime does not necessarily mean tokens will be sold, but it puts them within reach of a sale and reverses a month of inactivity that had kept the SOL position immobile.

Forward Industries is one of the most aggressive Solana-treasury imitators of the Strategy bitcoin playbook, and its cost basis above $230 leaves it among the most exposed corporate holders if the current drawdown continues.

Better And Coinbase Close First Fannie Mae-Backed BTC Mortgage

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Better Home & Finance Holding Company (NASDAQ: BETR) and Coinbase (NASDAQ: COIN) on Thursday announced the funding of the first Fannie Mae-backed mortgage collateralized by Bitcoin in the United States, marking what the companies called a pivotal moment in bridging digital asset wealth and traditional homeownership.

The debut loan was closed by Joe and Amy, a married couple in their early 30s from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who used Bitcoin holdings as collateral to fund their down payment rather than liquidating their position, the companies said.

The couple pledged their crypto through Coinbase’s custody infrastructure and obtained a conforming mortgage through Better without incurring capital gains taxes or surrendering their long-term exposure to Bitcoin’s potential upside.

“Buying our first home has always been the goal, but I wasn’t willing to give up a decade of investing to get there,” said the homebuyer. “With this mortgage, I didn’t have to choose. We closed on our home and my Bitcoin stayed intact. We didn’t have to liquidate, didn’t have to time the market, and didn’t have to start over financially to achieve our homeownership goals. That meant everything.”