저자: TomLee · 외국인
요약 보기
토큰화(tokenization)가 10년짜리 슈퍼사이클이며 이더리움이 그 핵심 인프라가 될 것이라는 주장. 이더리움/비트코인 비율 평균 0.08을 근거로 BTC 10만달러 가정 시 ETH 약 1.6만달러 산출, ETH가 BTC와 같은 시총이면 약 25만달러로 제시. 단기 매매는 승률 약 5%라며 장기 보유 강조. 10월 10일 크래시는 스테이블코인 가격 오류로 인한 ADL·연쇄 청산이라는 기술적 충격으로 규정. 2025년 비트코인 디지털 골드 서사는 수용됐고 향후 관심은 이더리움 쪽이라고 언급.
다듬은 글
Could Ethereum be preparing for a historic breakout just as Wall Street begins tokenizing everything on blockchain? Right now, one of the most respected voices on Wall Street believes investors are dramatically underestimating what is about to happen in crypto. Tom Lee, the Fundstrat founder who has been recommending Bitcoin and Ethereum for nearly a decade, says the market is missing a much bigger story.
According to him, Ethereum is not just another cryptocurrency. It may be the foundation of a massive financial transformation that could unfold over the next 10 years. Lee argues that what we are witnessing today is the early stage of a tokenization supercycle. Wall Street is beginning to move real-world assets onto blockchains, starting with stablecoins and expanding into stocks, bonds, and entire financial markets.
And if that shift accelerates, the platform that hosts those assets could become one of the most valuable networks on Earth. In this video, we are going to break down Tom Lee's full thesis on Ethereum and crypto. We will look at why he believes Ethereum's future value could be far higher than investors expect, the simple framework he uses to estimate its price potential, what really caused the October 10th crypto crash, and why Wall Street may now be choosing Ethereum as the backbone for the future of finance.
. I think people and this happens in the stock world. Everybody wants instant gratification. They want to hit the buy button, and the next day they make money. Of course, if not, it's a scam. Yeah. And and everyone thinks that over the next five years, they'll push the buy button a thousand times and get a thousand buy buttons, right?
I wish it was that. Yeah. And as you know, like the the odds of anyone trading successfully a thousand trades, you know, and coming out ahead is yeah, statistically like 5%. Actually, Hong They did a study on Hong Kong traders. It's like 5% make money day trading. Everyone else loses money. You're better off investing.
Listen to this. 5%. Yeah, most people can't day trade cuz there's too much emotion involved. at all. Yeah. So, if I had to say what are people getting wrong with Ethereum? Tokenization is the super cycle. Mhm. [clears throat] It's 5 10-year story. Which means over the next 10 years, 10 years from now, Ethereum is a completely different chain than it is today.
Monster sized. So, today's price is discounting the next 10 years, right? Like imagine you're like looking with a telescope 10 years from now. So, you're looking at something a thousand miles away and you get there. That's Ethereum's future. So, the discount to the future [snorts] is like it's a thousand miles away and you just took five steps.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's still in the future. So, Ethereum's price is not about what's happening today, it's about the future. And so, they shouldn't expect the price to go up every day, but they should invest in that super cycle. And I think that what people get wrong is if you're discounting the future, Ethereum at 5,000 and Ethereum at 3,000, it's still got a hundred-thousand-dollar price in the future.
And that difference in the price today is just a a small variation in the discount rate. Mhm. That's what people get wrong is that they have to sit through the volatility. One of the biggest mistakes investors make in crypto has nothing to do with technology or regulation. It has to do with impatience.
According to Tom Lee, the problem is that most people treat crypto like a casino instead of a long-term investment. He points out that many traders believe they can repeatedly press the buy button and instantly make money. If the price does not rise immediately, they assume the investment was a mistake or even a scam, but real market data tells a very different story.
A well-known study of day traders in Hong Kong found that only about 5% of active traders consistently make money. The overwhelming majority eventually lose capital. The reason is simple. Markets move with volatility, emotion, and unpredictable cycles. Short-term trading amplifies those forces instead of removing them.
Lee believes the real opportunity in crypto comes from understanding long term adoption. When investors constantly jump in and out of positions, they often miss the most important part of the growth curve. The early stage expansion when networks quietly build infrastructure before the market fully realizes what is happening.
This is where Ethereum becomes important in Lee's view. He describes the rise of blockchain-based finance as a long-term structural shift that could play out over the next decade. During that time, the network itself will evolve dramatically. The applications built on top of it will multi- ply. Entire industries could migrate to blockchain infrastructure.
From that perspective, today's price fluctuations are not the real story. They are simply the noise that occurs while a new financial system slowly comes online. And that idea leads directly into Lee's biggest argument about Ethereum. Because if investors want to understand its long-term potential, they first need a simple framework for valuing the network itself.
I mean, I just give people some framework to think about. Like really simple. Yeah. They should just have two ways to price Ethereum in their head. Okay. One is it's What is its price ratio to Bitcoin? That should make sense cuz they're like, "If you think Ethereum's story is getting better than Bitcoin, like there's more excitement or things happening, then its price ratio relative to Bitcoin should go up.
I mean, it's sort of like Yeah. It would be like a relative price comparison. And uh that price ratio in the past was like 0.08. That's the average price of Ethereum to Bitcoin. Well, if someone thinks Bitcoin get gets to 100,000, which I think it will, then Ethereum just to get to its long-term average is like 16,000.
Yeah. Okay. And it's like 3,000 right now. Now, if Ethereum gets to the same value as Bitcoin, the network value, that's like 250,000. Which could Ethereum be more valuable than Bitcoin it in the future? Keep in mind, OpenAI is probably, if it was a publicly traded company, would be worth a trillion dollars.
And it's one of four or five LLMs. OpenAI just by itself is worth three times Ethereum right now. Is Ethereum more valuable in relative to AI? Right, OpenAI is just one of like eight models. And if Ethereum is the dominant L1, shouldn't that be worth more than a couple trillion? A couple trillion, yeah.
So So then that So that's why when I say 3,000 ETH, you're getting so much future optionality. After explaining why most investors fail by focusing on short-term trading, Tom Lee offers a much simpler way to think about Ethereum. Instead of reacting to daily price swings, he says investors should step back and look at the bigger picture.
His first framework is a relative comparison between Bitcoin and Ethereum. In previous cycles, the value of Ethereum compared to Bitcoin followed a fairly consistent pattern. At various points in the past, Ethereum traded at a significant fraction of Bitcoin's value. That relationship matters because both networks represent different parts of the same digital asset economy.
Bitcoin has become widely accepted as a digital gold. Institutions, hedge funds, and even governments increasingly see it as a store of value. But, Ethereum plays a different role. It functions as the programmable layer where decentralized finance, tokenized assets, and blockchain applications operate.
Because of that difference, Lee believes the market often underestimates Ethereum's long-term potential. If Bitcoin continues expanding as a global store of value, the economic activity built on Ethereum could grow alongside it. Every new decentralized application, every stablecoin transaction, and every tokenized financial asset strengthens the network effect.
And that network effect is already visible. Stablecoins alone have become a massive industry, moving hundreds of billions of dollars across blockchain networks each year. Many of those transactions rely on Ethereum infrastructure. Large financial institutions are also experimenting with tokenized bonds, tokenized funds, and blockchain settlement systems built on Ethereum technology.
When Lee talks about Ethereum's future optionality, he is describing the possibility that the network becomes the backbone for a huge portion of digital finance. If that happens, today's valuations could look very small compared to the size of the system that may eventually run on top of Ethereum. But, to understand why Lee believes the market became temporarily confused about crypto's trajectory, we have to look at the event that shook sentiment across the entire industry.
. Actually, crypto is doing great. Bitcoin was up almost 40%. Yeah. Ethereum was up more than that. Yeah, we were we were living a great life October 9th. Yeah. So, So, now October 9th is only like 2 months ago. Yeah, I know. So, in 8 weeks, everyone's like suddenly like thinks they're dead. No more D-basement trade for crypto, right?
Yeah. Yeah, so what happened, of course we know what is that something happened on October 10th that everyone has we're only just recovering from. Because otherwise, October 9th, if we had closed the book there, it would have been a banner year for crypto. So, what did you mean though by that cuz you went viral for that?
The software bug. You know, what did you mean? Was it the the glitch? Was it cuz of the ADLs? Yeah, so it's So, ADL was like the portfolio insurance of the '87 crash, but ADL is not the problem. I thought that's what happened to market makers. Correct, but the ADL was triggered by what I consider a glitch, which was that there was a price grabbed for a stable coin that was based on an internal price.
Right. Because it cuz that stable coin broke a dollar. Yeah, it did. But it didn't break a dollar on an attack on that stable coin pretty much. Yeah, and it didn't break on other exchanges. It was just one posted price. So, in other words, if that's why I called it a glitch cuz if the pricing was a composite and said, "Look, this is an aberration." Like let's say that you were manually running liquidations and you were an ADL, okay?
And you saw that this thing went to 65, so it made wiped out the But then you looked at the next exchange, it was still at a dollar. You would have said, "St- Hold the presses. Don't liquidate anybody. This is a glitch. It's really a dollar. The price is just messed up in terms." Yeah. But because of a code is law, that was the price, and it triggered ADL on one on one exchange, but then it triggered cascade liquidations everywhere.
Because you're selling Yeah, you're selling positions that were in money, but as that price fell falls on spot, it causes ADLs on other exchanges. That's why I think it's a glitch. But I But, you know, It's terrible. Then it won't happen again. To understand why crypto sentiment suddenly collapsed, Tom Lee points to a very specific moment that many investors still misunderstand.
Just before the market turned negative, the industry was actually having a strong year. Bitcoin had already delivered major gains, and Ethereum had per- formed even better. Confidence was high, and adoption trends were moving in the right direction. Then something unusual happened. According to Lee, a sudden technical event on October 10 triggered a chain reaction across multiple exchanges.
A stablecoin briefly printed a price far below its expected value on a single trading platform. Under normal conditions, traders would quickly recognize that price as an error because the same asset was still trading near its normal value on other exchanges. But automated systems always recognize context.
Many exchanges use automatic liquidation mechanisms that respond instantly when collateral appears to lose value. Because the system treated that abnormal price as real, it triggered automatic deleveraging across leveraged positions. Once those liquidations began, the selling pressure spread rapidly.
Traders who had been holding profitable positions suddenly saw those positions forced closed as a cascade moved through the market. That created additional selling pressure, which then triggered further liquidations on other exchanges. Events like this are rare, but they demonstrate how sensitive markets can be when automated trading systems interact with high leverage.
The key point Lee emphasizes is that the event did not change the long-term fundamentals of crypto. It was a technical shock that damaged sentiment and forced many leveraged traders out of the market. In fact, he believes these types of shakeouts often reset the market by removing excess speculation.
And once that speculative layer disappears, the next stage of the cycle can begin with stronger hands holding the assets. That is why Lee believes the real story of crypto is not the temporary volatility. The real story is where the technology is heading next. We've been writing and recommending both Bitcoin and Ethereum for the last 9 years.
But we were leaning towards people allocating more heavily to Bitcoin. Uh because we just thought the digital gold was an easier narrative to explain to our clients. Mhm. And but now in 2025, I think digital gold and Bitcoin as store values is well accepted. So, there's less in my mind discovery of that argument.
I mean, it's still a you know, there's still a lot of virtues to Bitcoin. But when I look at the next 10 years, 15 years, we're a lot more excited about Ethereum than Bitcoin's future. you have all these like price calls. Like you were calling for what? 7,500 this year? Yeah. got hit a little bit. Yes.
We're at December 4th now. We'll see where we get to the end of the year. Yeah. I think Ethereum can still and Bitcoin could have big moves between now and year end. So, but the reason to be excited about Ethereum is Wall Street is choosing to use the blockchain for the future. That's the big change.
It started with stablecoins. And it was a big aha moment for Wall Street. But that's just tokenizing a dollar. And now Wall Street wants to tokenize everything. Oh, yeah. And they're not going to build it on Bitcoin. No. They need a smart contract platform. For years, Tom Lee and his team recommended both Bitcoin and Ethereum to investors, but their emphasis leaned heavily toward Bitcoin.
The reason was simple. Bitcoin's narrative as digital gold was easier for institutions to understand. It had a clear use case as a store of value, and it did not require explaining complicated technical systems. But that environment has changed dramatically. Lee believes Bitcoin's role as digital gold is now widely accepted across Wall Street.
Major asset managers, hedge funds, and pension funds have already begun allocating to Bitcoin through direct purchases and through Bitcoin-based ETFs. The idea that Bitcoin can function as a long-term store of value is no longer controversial in the same way it was years ago. Because of that shift, Lee says the next phase of discovery may revolve around Ethereum.
The reason is tokenization. Financial institutions are beginning to experiment with placing real-world assets onto blockchain networks. Stablecoins were the first step. They allowed dollars to move across blockchains quickly and efficiently, creating a new digital payment infrastructure. But stablecoins were only the beginning.
Now, banks and financial companies are exploring tokenized bonds, tokenized funds, tokenized equities, and blockchain-based settlement systems. If financial assets can be represented digitally and traded instantly on a blockchain, the entire structure of financial markets could change. And those systems require smart contract platforms.
Bitcoin was not designed to host complex financial applications. Ethereum was. It allows developers to build programmable contracts that execute financial agreements automatically on chain. This is why Lee believes Wall Street may increasingly rely on Ethereum as the infrastructure layer for tokenized finance.
If global financial markets begin migrating onto blockchain networks over the coming decade, the platform that hosts those assets could become extraordinarily valuable. And that possibility leads directly into the bigger idea Lee keeps emphasizing, the rise of tokenization may represent the beginning of a much larger transformation in global finance.
When Tom Lee talks about the future of Ethereum, he often describes it as a super cycle rather than a short-term trade. In his view, the real transformation is not happening over weeks or months, it is unfolding across many years as financial infrastructure slowly moves onto blockchain networks. Tokenization sits at the center of that shift.
The idea behind tokenization is simple. Any asset that exists in the traditional financial system can be represented digitally on a blockchain. Stocks, bonds, real estate, funds, and even commodities can be issued as blockchain-based tokens. Once those assets exist on chain, they can be traded instantly, settled faster, and moved across borders without relying on multiple layers of intermediaries.
Large financial institutions have already begun exploring this concept. Several global banks have experimented with blockchain settlement systems. Asset managers are testing tokenize funds. Payment companies continue expanding stablecoin infrastructure that allows dollars to move around the world in seconds.
All of these developments strengthen the argument that blockchain networks could eventually support a large portion of global financial activity. This is where Ethereum enters the picture. Because it was designed as a programmable blockchain, it allows developers to create decentralized applications and financial contracts that operate directly on chain.
That flexibility makes it one of the most widely used platforms for decentralized finance and tokenized assets today. Lee believes investors often underestimate how large that ecosystem could become over time. When people focus only on daily price movements, they miss the larger structural shift happening underneath the market.
And if tokenization continues expanding and more financial activity moves onto blockchain networks, the infrastructure supporting that system could grow enormously in value. And that is why Lee believes the real Ethereum story is not about what the price does tomorrow. It is about what the network could become as the foundation of a new financial era. .
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