Subscribe to Bankless or sign in
🔒 FREE PREVIEW: Upgrade to unlock full access. Join Bankless Premium.
gm Bankless Nation,
Tom Lee and 
Michael Saylor are taking classic Etherean and Bitcoiner approaches to stacking their favorite assets. Today, David lays out how the two DAT giants are diverging as they continue making massive buys.
Join Bankless Premium to dive deeper,
luma 🫡
Sponsor: Brix — Access real-world yield in DeFi. Built on MegaETH.
As crypto pokes its head out of crypto winter, there's a story emerging about the two dominant DATs that are influencing the market: Strategy and Bitmine.
If this crypto bear market is indeed muted compared to previous bears (knock on wood), then it will likely be credited to the fact that these two DATs brought idiosyncratic buying pressure to their respective assets that previous bear markets did not have to the same degree.
Strategy’s STRC is dominating the headlines, creating meaningful bitcoin buy pressure. Did you know Strategy has bought $7.3B of BTC in Q1 2026? Holy f dude… that's a lot! This is being fueled by breakout sales of the STRC product, giving Saylor the extra credit line he needs to smash the market-buy button.
But at the same time… Bitmine has quietly been purchasing ETH as well.
Bitmine’s ETH reserve has grown 15% in Q1 of this year – pushing Bitmine above 4% of the total ETH supply. Unlike Strategy, however, Bitmine is doing this without debt.
I do not know of the full black magic Tom Lee somehow possesses to be able to acquire $1.4B of ETH this quarter without having to create the massive cash obligations that cause people to worry about the MSTR common stock.
While on the surface these are both just DATs buying their respective assets, popping open the hood reveals a huge divergence in strategy...
Emerging markets provide some of the best yield on Earth. Opportunities shouldn't be constrained by geography or capital. Brix provides access to real yield, not made-up onchain mechanisms. Let the Yield Flow.
📈 The Asset
- Bitmine now owns over 4% of the total ETH supply
- ETH added $20B to its market cap this week
- Charles Schwab is rolling out spot trading for ETH (and BTC)
🏛️ The Protocol
- New EIPs: Counterfactual Transactions & ECRECOVER Native Key Awareness
- New research: The L2 Fee Vault & Frame Transactions + The Three Gates to Privacy
- Ethereal News runs down latest ERCs
📱 The Apps
- Aave V4 crossed $20M in deposits
- zFi integrated the ECF’s Swapboard tech
- Base App rolled out referral fees
- Baseline is launching its ecosystem token on Ethereum next week
- CoW Swap published a postmortem on its DNS hijack
- Ether.fi completed its migration to OP Mainnet
- Etherscan added support for the Ethereum Follow Protocol
- ETHGas locked down a $3B partnership with Ether.fi
- evm.now open-sourced its block explorer
- GMX’s gold/silver perps hit $10M volume in first-day trading
- Rainbow debuted $RNBW staking
- Uniswap debuts Developer Platform
- World unveils World ID integration with Tinder
🐸 The Culture
- The EF unveiled a $1M Audit Subsidy fund
- Trent Van Epps also left the EF
- Josh Stark stepped down from the EF leadership team
💽 The Tech
Markets are ripping back to all-time highs, but crypto still isn’t following suit.
Ryan and David break down the V-shaped recovery driven by Iran de-escalation, why 
Bitcoin is still stuck in range, and the growing bull vs bear divide across macro and onchain data. They also unpack Saylor’s STRC “money printer,” the World Liberty DeFi controversy, and the SEC’s surprise ruling that just gave DeFi a major win.
Plus: the Bitcoin community’s plan to freeze Satoshi’s coins and what it means for the future of the network.
Tune into this week’s Rollup! 👇
