Smart Money Is Loading Up While Crypto Sentiment Hits Rock Bottom
Crypto sentiment is in the gutter. Bitcoin is sitting at $68,000, memecoins are bleeding out, and the Nasdaq correlation has flipped sharply positive — meaning crypto is now moving in lockstep with the tech selloff. Most of your timeline is doom and gloom.
But behind the noise, something interesting is happening: the biggest players in the game are buying hand over fist.
Strategy: Still Buying Below Cost Basis
Michael Saylor's Strategy (formerly MicroStrategy) added another 2,486 BTC last week for $168.4 million, at an average price of $67,710 per coin. The company now holds 717,131 bitcoin acquired for a total of $54.52 billion — an average cost of $76,027 per coin.
Let that sink in. Strategy is sitting on approximately $5.7 billion in unrealized losses. MSTR shares are down over 60% year-over-year. And Saylor's response? Keep buying. The purchases were funded through $90.5 million in common stock sales and $78.4 million from the company's STRC preferred stock series.
You can call it reckless conviction or disciplined accumulation. Either way, it's the opposite of what retail is doing right now.
BitMine: The ETH Strategy Play, Doubling Down
If Strategy is the bitcoin accumulation machine, BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) is its Ethereum counterpart — and it's following the same playbook through the pain.
Last week, BitMine purchased 45,759 ETH worth $91 million, its largest weekly buy of 2026 in token terms. Total holdings now stand at 4.37 million ETH (roughly $8.7 billion), with the firm sitting on nearly $8 billion in paper losses. They now own 3.62% of all ETH in existence.
Chairman Tom Lee — yes, that Tom Lee — isn't sugarcoating the environment. He compared current crypto sentiment to "the forlornness and dejection seen at the November 2022 lows and depths of 2018 crypto winter." But he drew a critical distinction: there have been no major collapses of large players this time. No FTX. No Luna. No Celsius. The price action is ugly, but the infrastructure is intact.
BitMine has also staked over 3 million ETH, generating $176 million in annualized staking rewards at a 2.89% yield. They're not just holding — they're earning yield through the downturn.
Intesa Sanpaolo: The Quiet European Giant
Perhaps the most interesting signal today came from Italy. Intesa Sanpaolo, one of Europe's largest banks, disclosed $96 million in Bitcoin ETF holdings in a 13F filing — spread across ARK 21Shares Bitcoin ETF ($72.6M) and iShares Bitcoin Trust ($23.4M).
But the sophisticated part is what else was in the filing: a large put option position on Strategy shares. This isn't a simple long-Bitcoin bet. It's a basis trade. Intesa is long BTC through ETFs while betting that Strategy's stock premium over its actual Bitcoin holdings (the mNAV multiple) will compress. Strategy's mNAV has already fallen from 2.9x to 1.21x — and if it keeps falling toward 1.0x, that put prints money while the BTC position holds value.
This is institutional-grade crypto trading from a traditional European bank. The game has changed.
What the Pattern Tells Us
Three very different entities — a software company turned BTC treasury, a crypto-native ETH accumulator, and a legacy European bank — are all doing the same thing: buying into the weakness.
Meanwhile, the correlation between Bitcoin and the Nasdaq has swung from -0.68 to +0.72 since early February. The macro headwinds are real. Tech stocks are selling off, gold is retreating, and risk-off sentiment is dominating.
But this is exactly the environment where generational positions get built. Not when everyone is euphoric at all-time highs, but when sentiment is in the gutter and the timeline is convinced it's over.
Tom Lee called it a "mini-winter." The institutions are calling it a buying opportunity. History tends to side with the accumulators.
Not financial advice. DYOR.
