Hyperliquid Vs Ethereum: Did Tom Lee Pick The Wrong Crypto Treasury Asset For Bitmine?

What Happened

BitMine launched its Ethereum treasury strategy on June 30, 2025, with a $250 million private placement.

Hyperliquid routes most fee revenue into open-market HYPE purchases. The HYPE buyback program has absorbed more than $1.16 billion in fees since launch.

Market Context

Liquidity matters at this scale.

Meanwhile, HYPE’s $14.9 billion market cap could not have absorbed similar deployment without slippage.

Calculating BitMine’s capital deployed into HYPE instead would now show roughly $44 billion in profits. That figure climbs further if HYPE clears $100.

The risk for Lee is timing. Hyperliquid captured the dominant on-chain narrative of this cycle. The token holds about 57.8% of the perpetual DEX market share.

Why It Matters

“If Tom Lee had bought HYPE instead of ETH for Bitmine He would have been up 520% and made $44 billion. Potentially crossing Michael Saylor once HYPE hits $100,” degennQuant, cofounder of Hyperbeat, suggested.

Details

Tom Lee’s BitMine bought 5.4 million Ethereum (ETH) instead of Hyperliquid (HYPE), and now faces a binary verdict. The Ethereum holding is down 21% since June 30, 2025. HYPE is up 68% over the same window.

The question is whether Tom Lee built the institutional position he intended to create. Or whether he picked the wrong asset for a cycle that already rewarded perpetual exchange tokens.

Both readings stay defensible until ETH either reflates or rolls over.

The Conviction Case

Tom Lee, head of Fundstrat, joined as chairman. The mandate was never to chase the hottest token in the cycle. It targets roughly 5% of the ether supply (through alchemy) as a public proxy for institutional ETH.

That thesis rests on three pillars:

Ether’s staking yield turns the treasury into an income asset rather than a static bet.

Around 87% of the holding sits on BitMine’s MAVAN staking platform, generating about $276 million in annualized revenue.

BitMine has absorbed $8 billion in losses without dislocating ETH’s order books.

“Tom Lee is down eight billion dollars on ETH and Vitalik decides to write a sci fi novel,” David Hoffman, co-owner at Bankless, remarked.

Indeed, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said he would pause his usual blog posts to write sci-fi about decentralized governance, testing governance ideas through fiction rather than research posts.

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The third pillar is institutional fit.

Tom Lee’s bull case treats Ethereum as the settlement layer for tokenized assets, stablecoins, and on-chain agents.

That thesis assumes ETH becomes financial infrastructure, not the cycle’s best-performing token.

The Miss Case

The counterfactual is sharp. HYPE traded for $67.14 as of this writing, up 101% in 12 months and 68% since BitMine’s pivot.