Can money buy Ethereum?

In the past few months, a new class of public companies has raced to amass billions in crypto. The largest, after Michael Saylor’s bitcoin-focused Strategy, is BitMine Immersion (BMNR) chaired by Wall Street strategist Tom Lee, which now holds about 3.75% of ETH’s supply, according to Blockworks Research data. 

That begs the question: will digital-asset treasuries (DATs) turn their balance sheets into protocol leverage?

In principle, DATs can garner real sway, suggests Ryan Watkins of Syncracy Capital, while skeptics counter that Ethereum’s governance process, client diversity and stubborn validator “social layer” make outright capture unlikely.

While the issue quickly enters the speculative realm, one thing that is clear is BitMine is in a privileged position among DATs, according to Watkins, because of its trading volume. 

“BitMine’s doing, on average, well over 10x the amount of volume [compared to SBET] every day,” Watkins told Blockworks. “So it can raise money the fastest to buy ETH, and it's just going to continue to scale.”

Where a DAT could matter

It’s early days and DATs are still focused primarily on how to grow their treasuries. Watkins sketched a plausible arc for a well-financed DAT if the easy capital flywheel slows.

“At a certain point, I do think that the mNAV alchemy will stop working as well, and then you'll start to see BitMine getting more creative and aggressive, like deploying the ETH onchain and starting to be a bigger player in the Ethereum economy,” he said.

Influence would accumulate indirectly, most likely affecting application governance first; if a DAT parks a nine-figure balance on Aave or a major liquid staking protocol, its views would carry weight. 

“If you’re Aave and Tom Lee is 10–20% of your deposits, you might want his opinion before a big change,” Watkins said.

Then there could be infrastructure ownership. If the DAT starts operating validators, RPCs and indexers in a big way, it could shift who gets called when parameters or client development priorities change.

Talent capture is another risk. While hiring or even starting a core development team alone doesn’t move Ethereum’s governance process, a dense cluster of researchers and client contributors under a single treasury could be a kind of soft power.

Dr. Paul Dylan-Ennis, a lecturer at University College Dublin (known on X as Polar), and avid Ethereum governance watcher, pushes in the other direction. Ethereum isn’t a company, and the Ethereum Foundation isn’t a management team.

“It’s a weird polycentric system of people who have specifically opted into its ethos, which is a little ideological,” Dylan-Ennis told Blockworks.

He understands the assumption that “money talks” and, at sufficient scale, someone like Lee could wield ETH holdings to shape Ethereum’s direction. 

“But that’s a fundamental misreading of how Ethereum works, both culturally and structurally,” Dylan-Ennis said.

The governance structure of Ethereum, from AllCoreDevs (ACD) calls, EIP editors, the Cat Herders, and so on, are about coordinating processes, not profits. To “take over” Ethereum, a DAT would have to build consensus with client teams, and then convince a globally distributed base of node operators and validators to run its preferred code.

Today, public trackers show on the order of 10,000–15,000+ Ethereum nodes globally — a diffuse base that must opt in to any change. That is far messier than hiring a few senior engineers, in Dylan-Ennis’ view.

“Maybe Ethereum is not the perfect example,” Watkins noted, also referring to the governance process as “messier” than “a democratic or plutocratic governance system where it's just clear who has the power [and] how much power they have.”

“For Solana it's more straightforward,” Watkins said. “You hold a ton of tokens, you vote with those tokens — that's the impact.”

But DATs are in a “speculative incubation period, where we're figuring out how to scale these treasuries the fastest,” he said. Right now, for a successfully scaling DAT like BitMine, there’s no pressure to get creative in governance. At least not yet.

Smaller treasuries are already experimenting at the edges. “They need to find ways to stand out,” Watkins said. So, we see ETHZilla deploying hundreds of millions of dollars into liquid staking ecosystems, for instance.

BitMine isn’t doing that for now, but the potential is there. 

Ethereum’s immune system

Dylan-Ennis’ rejoinder is that Ethereum’s governance has repeatedly chosen caution over expediency. The project’s “immune system” is the combination of process and culture: rough consensus on ACD, conservative client teams across both consensus and execution layers, and a constituency of node operators who are ideological first and profit-driven second.

There’s no shortcut around EIP review, client implementation and building social consensus around chain upgrades. Any putative DAT push would still face these bottlenecks.

Coinbase — or any major stakeholder — can offer input like everyone else, but history suggests outsized corporate pressure backfires in credibly neutral systems. The closest historical analog is outside Ethereum: Bitcoin’s 2017 block size war, where a miner-exchange-VC coalition backed SegWit2x, only to lose to a user-led counter-movement.

The most likely outcome of a heavy-handed push, Dylan-Ennis argues, isn’t capture but a hard-forked ghost chain and reputational blowback for whoever tried, much like Bitcoin Cash (BCH) is today.

Stablecoin issuers and exchanges can influence which fork “wins” by deciding what they support — exactly what happened during the 2022 Merge, when Circle (USDC) and Tether (USDT) publicly committed to support only the proof-of-stake chain, starving the PoW fork of oxygen. Any future governance break would likely see similar alignment dynamics. 

Watkins invoked the essay by Jo Freeman, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” as a potential critique of Ethereum governance: when formal authority is weak, informal centers of gravity emerge. “It’s not clear who has the power,” he said. That doesn’t mean power is absent.

“A good candidate for being one of these centers…is whoever holds a 10% mountain of ETH,” Watkins said. Influence, in that world, would mean coalition-building with large stakeholders, like exchanges and asset managers, and winning “hearts and minds” of operators within the ecosystem to adopt a given release when it ships.

The essay’s remedy — make authority explicit — aligns with ongoing efforts to refine and improve EIP/ACD procedures, suggesting Ethereum’s best defense against perceived capture is more sunlight, not less.

But it has to be genuine. Prior analyses of open-source software communities note the same dynamic Freeman flags: rhetoric of openness can mask entrenched, informal hierarchies — useful context when evaluating claims like “anyone can propose an EIP.”

Open questions

For now, Watkins sees limited influence from Tom Lee, in part because scaling the balance sheet is still the main event. “He doesn’t even run a full node,” Watkins said, adding that staking through custodians presumably keeps BitMine’s ether far from having any impact on the day-to-day of client releases and parameter changes in the near term.

But the pace of accumulation, and the willingness of smaller DATs to push into infra, DeFi and validator operations, makes this more than a thought experiment.

Blockworks contacted a BitMine representative for comment on their future plans, but had not heard back at time of publication.

“We still just don’t know what the end state of these treasury companies will be,” Watkins said. If DATs evolve from price bets into policy levers, Ethereum’s norms will be tested in public.

The bet from Dylan-Ennis’ side is that those norms domesticate newcomers, rather than the other way around.

Vitalik Buterin has framed the cultural constraint clearly: “Ethereum is a decentralized ecosystem, and so any activity that Ethereum does cannot be a backroom decision of a few people, it must be viable as a cultural rallying point.”

You can’t fork culture, and you can’t buy legitimacy. In Ethereum, protocol control isn’t granted by capital, it’s ratified by consensus.

— Macauley Peterson

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