So, Joseph Lubin, co-founder of Consensys, once said that companies hoarding Ethereum could become the next "Berkshire Hathaway."

Let that sink in. Berkshire. Hathaway. The multi-hundred-billion-dollar empire built by Warren Buffett over decades of shrewd, value-based investing in actual, you know, businesses. And we're supposed to believe the crypto equivalent is a company whose entire strategy is "buy a lot of ETH and hold it."

Give me a break.

This whole "Digital Asset Treasury" thing was a brilliant scheme. No, 'brilliant' isn't right—it was a breathtakingly simple grift that worked, for a minute. And no one rode that wave harder than Tom Lee and his company, BitMine Immersion Technologies.

The One-Trick Pony

Remember the playbook? It was beautiful in its simplicity. You take a publicly traded company, you issue a ton of stock, and you use that cash to buy up crypto. For BitMine, the drug of choice was Ethereum. Last we checked, they’d piled up a cool $13 billion worth of it. The stock (BMNR) would trade at a premium to the value of the crypto it held—its Net Asset Value, or NAV. Investors, desperate for crypto exposure in their regular brokerage accounts, would happily overpay for the shares.

Why? Because before the ETF floodgates opened, it was one of the only games in town. You wanted ETH in your IRA? You bought something like BitMine.

And for a while, the stock went up. Tom Lee was giving speeches at conferences in Singapore, talking about how "AI and crypto" were the "two supercycle investing narratives." Translation: "The hype is real, please keep buying our stock so we can buy more ETH." The company became the largest publicly traded holder of Ethereum on the planet, second only to Michael Saylor’s Bitcoin-hoarding machine, Strategy.

They saw Saylor do it with Bitcoin and thought, 'Hey, we can do that too!' and the market, for some reason, just went along with it...

But here's the thing about a one-trick pony. It only works as long as nobody else figures out the trick. Or, more importantly, as long as a much simpler, cheaper, and better way to do the exact same thing doesn't come along.

The Emperor Has No Memes

The first crack in the dam came from the people who get paid to call out nonsense: the short-sellers. Kerrisdale Capital came out swinging, calling the whole digital treasury playbook "basic and unoriginal." Ouch. Kerrisdale Capital Shorts Bitmine, Calls Ethereum Treasury Strategy ‘Basic And Unoriginal’

Their argument was simple. As a legion of copycat companies jumped on the bandwagon, the premium that made the whole scheme work started to evaporate. Even the OG, Saylor’s Strategy, saw its premium slide from over 2x NAV down to 1.4x. If the cult leader himself couldn't keep the magic alive, what chance did the followers have?

Kerrisdale also took a shot at Tom Lee directly, calling him an "underwhelming meme lord." And honestly, they weren't wrong. The game Saylor played was as much about cult of personality as it was about Bitcoin. He was out there telling people to mortgage their houses. Lee, by contrast, was "too TradFi and boring." He wasn't firing off unhinged tweets or posting cat videos. It ain't rocket science; if you’re going to run a hype-based play, you need a master of hype at the helm.

But seriously, what was the long-term plan here? Just keep issuing stock to buy more ETH until you own the whole network? At what point does the premium you charge investors just become an anchor that sinks the whole ship? The shorts saw the writing on the wall. The model was unsustainable. It was a melting ice cube, and the sun was getting brighter.

And Then Came the Flood

If the short-sellers were the crack in the dam, the spot Ethereum ETFs were the tsunami that blew it to pieces. This was the real killer. The final, unavoidable nail in the coffin for the whole "crypto Berkshire Hathaway" fantasy.

By late 2025, you had giants like Bitwise and 21Shares, not to mention BlackRock’s iShares, rolling out spot ETH ETFs. These weren't some convoluted corporate structure trading at a weird premium. They were direct, regulated, low-fee vehicles to own Ethereum. And they came with a killer feature: staking.

Suddenly, you could buy an ETF that not only tracked the price of ETH but also paid you a yield—a dividend, basically—from staking rewards. Bitwise was charging a 0.20% fee. 21Shares was waiving its fee entirely for the first year. Bitwise and 21Shares Add Staking, Slash Fees in Latest Solana and Ethereum ETF Filings

The whole value proposition of a company like BitMine vanished overnight. Poof. Gone.

Why on earth would any sane investor pay a 40% premium to own shares in a company that just holds ETH, when you can buy an ETF from BlackRock for a 0.21% fee that also pays you a yield? It’s like trying to sell expensive, artisanal bottled water when a pristine, free-flowing river just appeared right next to your kiosk. You're done. It’s over. The game has changed, and you've been left behind. Offcourse, some diehards will stick around, but the institutional money—the money that matters—is going to take the cheaper, simpler, yield-bearing option every single time.

So, It Was Just a Complicated Piggy Bank?

Let's be real. Calling these companies the "Berkshire Hathaway" of crypto was always an insult to Warren Buffett. Berkshire Hathaway buys and builds productive businesses. These companies just bought a commodity and wrapped it in a corporate shell to charge you a premium for the convenience. They were never building anything. They were just holding something. They weren't an investment firm; they were a glorified, high-fee piggy bank, and the moment a better piggy bank came along, their reason for existing evaporated. The dream is dead.