Cathie Wood’s Ark Invest Buys BitMine Ethereum Treasury Shares After Cutting Bitcoin Price Target

Ark Invest, the investment firm run by noted technology investor Cathie Wood, added 240,507 shares—around $9.2 million worth—of Ethereum treasury firm BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) via three of its actively managed ETFs on Thursday. 

The firm’s latest acquisition comes amid a slide in BMNR shares as Ethereum continues to fall from its recently set all-time high. Shares of BMNR are up 2% on Friday, now changing hands above $38 as ETH trades at $3,375. 

Collectively, Ark’s ARKK, ARKF, and ARKW ETFs now collectively hold more than 6.8 million shares of BMNR, valued at nearly $260 million. 

The firm made its biggest purchase of BMNR in July, adding around 4.7 million shares when it was trading around $40.77. At the time, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee called Wood’s investment “an exponential opportunity,” indicating that he was “delighted” at her firm’s participation. 

BitMine now holds nearly 3.4 million ETH valued at almost $11.3 billion, making it the largest publicly traded Ethereum treasury firm and the second-largest publicly traded digital asset treasury, only trailing the Bitcoin-hoarding Strategy with its nearly $65 billion BTC stash.

Wood and her firm have been consistently bullish on digital assets and crypto equities, but on Thursday, she made headlines when she lowered a future Bitcoin price target.

Previously, she predicted that the top crypto asset would reach $1.5 million per coin by 2030, but now she’s cut her forecast to $1.2 million, citing rapid stablecoin adoption as a hindrance. 

“Given what’s happening to stablecoins—serving emerging markets in the way we thought Bitcoin would—I think we could take $300,000 off of that bullish case [for Bitcoin],” Wood said in an interview with CNBC on Thursday. 

The $1.2 million price target matches the “base case” provided by Wood’s firm earlier this year when accounting for the “active supply” of Bitcoin—which discounts lost or long-held coins. In that report, the firm saw a bull case of $2.4 million per coin for BTC by 2030. 

Bitcoin is up 1.3% in the last 24 hours, now trading at $102,488. On Tuesday, the leading crypto asset dipped below $100,000 for the first time since May, and it again dipped below that mark early Friday. 

With its recent decline, predictors on Myriad no longer foresee the top crypto asset making a new all-time high again this year, giving odds of it happening just a 26% chance of doing so. 

Ethereum is up around 2.7% in the same time frame, now nearly 33% off its August all-time high of $4,946.