18th January 2026 > > BMNR & Mr. Beast.

tl;dr

Some techie nonsense to get you laughing on a Sunday morning. BMNR and Mr. Beast may be of more interest than you might have imagined.

Market Snap

Market Wrap

I really cannot find anything interesting to say, so let’s have a laugh at some techie nonsense instead:

“Holding this reclaimed level keeps the “real breakout” structure intact and preserves the pattern’s measured upside objective near $107,000, derived by adding the triangle’s maximum height to the breakout point, by February.”

Curious Crypto’s Commentary – Bitmine (BMNR) & Mr. Beast (who?)

Bitmine Immersion Technologies was a small-scale BTC mining company whose claimed edge was in proprietary systems for cooling the mining rigs. Faced with competitors of a much greater size, and ongoing negative earnings, BMNR pivoted in June 2025 to become an ETH DAT (Digital Asset Treasury) with an initial $250mm private placement to buy ETH. Investors that day were happy with a 700% rally in the stock price shortly afterwards.

Copying Strategy’s playbook, BMNR now raises new equity and sells convertible bonds to buy ETH – that is all it ever (mostly) does now. It has declared over 4.1mm ETH on its balance sheet, currently valued at over $13.5bn, whilst its stock price gives a market capitalisation of $14.2bn, a perfectly satisfactory premium for a DAT during quiet periods for the crypto markets.

BMNR now owns 3.4% of ETH coins in circulation with a publicly stated target of owning 5%. For the time being, there is one large buyer of ETH who remains price insensitive to the absolute level of ETH, but it is highly sensitive to the premium or discount of its own share price relative to its holdings of ETH.

BMNR is also continually adding its new purchases of ETH to the ETH staking queue. It is partially responsible for the increased wait for investors to stake and unstake ETH.

I feel duty bound to repeat here once again, that staking rewards are misunderstood by almost everyone, particularly the Twitterati and techies, who are often the same people.

One frequently hears and reads that staking rewards are the equivalent of a yield earned on an investment, or that staking rewards are equivalent to the interest received on bank deposits. For those who can’t be bothered to think too hard about the world, that is a simple analogy to draw, but it is completely fallacious.

It is more accurate to view staking rewards as an inflation in the number of coins issued. All other things being equal (which they never are), the market cap remains unchanged, implying that the cash price of each individual coin reduces by the same amount as the inflation caused by the staking rewards. Staked coins retain their value, whereas unstaked coins lose value because of the inherent inflation.

What this means in practice is that all investments in proof-of-stake (PoS) consensus coins should be staked to avoid losing value, but that staking process means that the coins are less liquid than before. I think the unstaking queue for ETH was recently quoted as being as long as fifty-five days. There are liquid staking options in the form of LSTs (Liquid Staked Tokens) but apart from ETH most LSTs are, well, not liquid.

…

I recently learned that Mr. Beast is the largest influencer personality on the planet. I mean, who knew? I have never willingly engaged with an influencer, though I have stumbled accidentally upon the concept in the past. Mr. Beast is quoted as having a net worth of $2.6bn, which isn’t bad for a twelve-year old, or whatever his age is. Apparently his “creator” earnings are close to $100mm a year (so nearly on a par with the income generated by the CCC) but most of his wealth is derived from owning a majority stake in Beast Industries.

Last October, Beast Industries filed the trademark “Mr. Beast Financial” with the aim of developing an app to offer “crypto exchange, payment processing, banking, and insurance services”. We know that payment processing is rapidly moving to public blockchain enabled stablecoins, which will drive crypto adoption in banking, and later in insurance. Mr. Beast seemed to be positioning himself as a major crypto player.

Not much has happened since.

Until now:

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/bitmine-immersion-technologies-bmnr-announces-200-million-investment-in-beast-industries-302662082.html?tc=eml_cleartime

BMNR has invested $200mm into Beast Industries, giving it a 4% stake. Thomas Lee, Chairman of BMNR skirts around why the company has done this:

"Beast Industries is the largest and most innovative creator-based platform in the world and our corporate and personal values are strongly aligned."

Hmm. Whatever. There must be more to it than that. Perhaps, Jeff Housenbold, CEO of Beast Industries, can provide some insight:

“We look forward to exploring ways to further collaborate and incorporate DeFi into our upcoming financial services platform."

Boom! There we go.

With 460 million subscribers (seriously) Mr. Beast lives up to his name. If this speculative investment by BMNR puts ETH at the heart of a crypto empire built by Mr. Beast, that rather fanciful price prediction for ETH by Standard Chartered (https://www.curiouscryptos.com/post/16th-january-2026-miscellany) suddenly starts to look a lot less fanciful, to me at least.