At its 2026 annual shareholders meeting, crypto treasury heavyweight Bitmine laid out an Ethereum-centric roadmap that had the crowd reaching for their hopium. The main event was Chairman Tom Lee’s deep dive into the decentralized exchange (DEX) protocol Lighter (LIT). Bitmine is clearly smitten with Lighter, positioning it as a core strategy piece, and in a chat with CEO Vlad, they pitched it less as a simple swap shop and more as the essential plumbing for the whole Ethereum ecosystem.
Lighter is a Layer-2 protocol built on Ethereum that’s flexing some serious muscle in transaction volume and speed (TPS). It’s basically taking Ethereum’s security and putting it on a double-shot espresso, aiming to disrupt perpetual futures and spot trading. Vlad boasted that its verifiable transaction process acts as a shield against market shenanigans like flash crashes, essentially giving degen traders a seatbelt.
Lee branded Lighter one of Bitmine’s ‘Moonshot’ bets, with the partnership targeting the tokenization of traditional Wall Street assets like stocks for blockchain deployment. Because nothing says "decentralized ethos" like putting Apple stock on-chain and hoping it doesn't get rekt by a smart contract bug. The move is a classic TradFi-to-DeFi pivot, betting that the future of finance runs on code rather than closing bells.
The meeting also spotlighted Bitmine’s $200 million stake in MrBeast’s Beast Industries, because apparently, crypto treasuries are now diversifying into YouTube empires. *This is not investment advice. Unless you consider following a YouTuber’s corporate holdings a sound financial strategy, in which case, good luck—you’re gonna need it.
