BitMine increased its ether holdings to 5.78 million tokens, securing 4.8 percent of total circulating supply.

Cointelegraph reported on Sunday that BitMine added 7,430 ether over the past week, bringing it close to the company’s goal of accumulating 5 percent of total ether in circulation.

According to the filing, about 4.9 million ether in BitMine’s holdings are staked through its own validator network and partners. That is about 85 percent of its total holdings. The company put the value of its assets, including cryptocurrencies, cash and marketable securities, at $11.5 billion. This included 207 bitcoin and $385 million in cash and marketable securities.

Over the same period, BitMine repurchased 5.5 million shares under a previously approved $4 billion share buyback programme. Earlier this month, it said its institutional staking platform MAVAN generated $45.7 million in staking and validation revenue over the three months ended. That accounts for 98 percent of the company’s total revenue.

The backdrop is Ethereum’s recent relative strength. On CoinMarketCap data, Ethereum has risen about 7.71 percent over the past seven days and more than 10 percent over the past month. Over the same periods, bitcoin rose about 4.8 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively. Strategy, the world’s largest corporate holder of bitcoin, halted bitcoin purchases for a second straight week and raised funds through share sales, lifting its cash holdings to more than $3.2 billion.

The move also coincided with expansion in the Ethereum ecosystem. Earlier this month, Robinhood launched Robinhood Chain, an Ethereum layer2 network based on Arbitrum. The network attracted more than $141 million in bridged ETH in its first two weeks after launch.

The process also reignited debate over how much institutional adoption of layer2 ultimately increases demand for Ethereum. Max Shannon (맥스 섀넌), a senior research analyst at Bitwise, said Robinhood Chain shows growth of the Ethereum ecosystem centred on traditional financial institutions. Ark Invest’s Lorenzo Valente (로렌초 발렌테) said Robinhood Chain supports the bullish view of Ethereum as the ecosystem’s monetary asset, but weakens the investment thesis that Ethereum gains significant value from layer2 fee revenue.

Bernstein also raised its target price for Robinhood to $160 from $130. Bernstein pointed to tokenised stocks and prediction markets, rather than traditional cryptocurrency trading, as the next growth engine for online brokerages. It also described Robinhood Chain as in-house infrastructure for tokenised real-world assets, and said it could build on-chain financial products without relying on third-party blockchains.

BitMine’s large-scale accumulation of ether, together with market trends, shows a move in which corporate treasury strategy expands in part from a bitcoin focus to Ethereum.