Barely a month after its first transaction with BitMine, the Ethereum Foundation announced another sale of significant quantities of Ether tokens to the digital asset treasury (DAT) company.
BitMine collects another 10,000 ETH from the Ethereum Foundation
In an April 24 post on Platform This over-the-counter transaction would have been carried out at an average cost of $2,387 (the equivalent of nearly $24 million in value).
This latest transaction comes a month and 10 days after the Ethereum Foundation sold 5,000 ETH (worth approximately $10.21 million at the time) to the digital asset treasury company led by Chairman Tom Lee. Similar to the previous sale, proceeds from this transaction will fund EF’s core operations and activities, including protocol R&D, ecosystem development, community grant funding, and more.
As reported in the last transaction, this sale is part of the ongoing treasury management activity and policy, where the Ethereum Foundation revealed that Ether will be sold to maintain its fiat currency assets from the Opex (operating expenses) buffer target. It should be noted that these token sales were not well received by the crypto community, with many believing that the foundation could earn revenue through staking rather than outright sales.
Interestingly, the Ethereum Foundation has also staked some of its ETH holdings over the past few months, making this latest transaction even more surprising. Earlier in the month, EF moved closer to its 70,000 ETH stake target after sending 45,000 Ether tokens to the Beacon deposit contract.
However, the fact that the counterparty to this 10,000 ETH transaction is BitMine should bring some calm to the crowd. With Ethereum’s largest holding company still looking to expand its stock, the market can be relatively confident that newly acquired tokens are unlikely to enter the open market.
The digital asset treasury company revealed earlier in the week that it purchased 101,627 tokens between April 13 and 19. The company chaired by Tom Lee now holds 4,976,485 ETH, or approximately 4.12% of the cryptocurrency supply.
What’s interesting is that BitMine reportedly aims to hold around 5% of the total supply of the second largest cryptocurrency. With the goal still a few percentage points away, the company’s acquisition spree isn’t likely to stop anytime soon.
Ethereum price at a glance
At the time of writing, the ETH price was around $2,316, down 0.6% in the last 24 hours. According to data from CoinGecko, the altcoin is down approximately 5% over the past 7 days.
The price of ETH on the daily timeframe | Source: ETHUSDT chart on TradingView
Featured image from iStock, chart from TradingView
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