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Part of our thesis is, we think Ethereum is massively undervalued and I mean, this bull cycle, I think it could easily be 25,000 or 50,000 per token. I think this is going to be a much, much bigger cycle than than what we've seen in the past. I mean, I think people kind of aren't bullish enough, actually.
I think you're going to see some monster moves in crypto prices. That's Tom Lee, Fundstrat co-founder and chairman of Bitmain, which holds more than 6 million ether. On Ondo Finance's stage at Token 2049, he laid out his case. First, the mood. Ethereum fell from around $4,000 a year ago to under 1,600 in June.
It's near 2,500 today. Lee says the winter is over. I mean, the last 12 months have been a grind cuz, you know, it's been a crypto winter, but KBW last week and this week, you can see the real change. You know, we are in a full-blown bull market again. Why is he so sure? Start with the money. Lee says the pool of wealth looking for a home gets bigger every single year.
The market is huge. I mean, it's 200 trillion dollars minimum, but it's also growing by about 7 trillion a year. Okay? That's I mean, just think about that for a minute. Every year, there's another 7 trillion dollars of liquid assets that's looking for a place to invest. So, for instance, you know, when you hear about people talk about hyperscalers and AI and they're going to spend a trillion a year, where the money comes from?
There's already 7 trillion dollars of new money waiting to fund anything. A lot of wealthy people invest in private equity and private credit. Now, that's illiquid and the returns have actually underperformed. So, I think the idea that tens of trillions of dollars has been allocated in funds that take 4 years, 5 years, 10 years to pay out.
And when you get your money back, you probably did about the same as a money market fund. That's a a very big addressable market. Right now, a lot of that money is chasing AI and everyone's asking if it's a bubble. Lee has followed markets for more than 30 years through the dot-com bust and 2008. If you think there's an AI bubble today, okay?
Foremost, it's a widely held view. I have never seen a bubble when everyone thinks it's a bubble. Okay, think about that for a minute. His measuring stick is the internet boom. And his favorite example is Cisco, the network giant of the '90s. Cisco didn't peak until 2000, okay? And between 1993 and 2000, Cisco went down 50% twice.
So, both you had nearly a wipeout twice. And I think we're basically today in 1997. I I think we're far from a bubble. The AI cycle, even if it's 25 years, the bubble is probably around 2033, the bubble peak. So, where does he put his own money? Bitmain keeps adding Ether. It now holds more than 6 million coins, nearly 5% of all Ether.
That's about $15 billion at today's price. We made a big bet on Ethereum because we at the time we thought Ethereum it would be the settlement rail of the future. So, we we believed a super cycle was coming for tokenization and crypto and that Ethereum was the the most neutral infrastructure because of the size of the development community,
the actual fact that it's had 100% uptime, and in the 15 months I I think it's been tracked, the token price is 2,700. It's been in the same price for 5 years. And as you guys know, the longer the base, the bigger the breakout. Quick favor, if this is useful, subscribe. It's free and it really helps.
That number at the top, 25 to $50,000 per ether, is his cycle call. So, the host asked something near. Where does ETH end this year? You know, I I think Ethereum should exceed its all-time high. So, I think it's above 5,000. I think Bitcoin's going to be over 100,000. And if that's the case, then I think Ethereum is around 7,500.
ether's record is near $4,950 from August 2025. 7,500 would be about triple today's price with under 3 months left in the year. So, why does Lee think this cycle could dwarf the last two? It comes down to who's buying. And as telling, the last two booms were mostly retail. In 2016-2017, that bull market was really an ICO story.
Uh but it was principally retail investors. But it was huge. I mean, it didn't take a lot of people to to cause Bitcoin to hit 18,000. And then in the 2019-2021 bull market, that was a lot about NFTs, which was, you know, a novel innovation. But that was again pretty much a retail boom. And And you saw massive moves in crypto prices.
But this bull cycle is coming at a time when institutions are building a lot of products. And I think we're seeing some real innovations. I mean, like Ondo announcing private markets today. That's bigger players, bigger dollars. And that shift could hurt some of the biggest names on Wall Street. Lee thinks banks have the most to lose.
What we have to be mindful of is tokenization is really a uh because you're Look, you you could almost tokenize everything that a bank does. Right? So, you're not just tokenizing assets, you're tokenizing the entire functional services of a bank. He compares them to two giants from early in his career.
NCR ruled computing and missed the personal computer. Then, there's MCI. How many of you guys heard of MCI? They were a juggernaut in telecoms because they offered long distance and calling cards. And they never made the pivot to mobile and they disappeared. Uh I think a lot of large financial institutions today, uh if they don't stand up a crypto rail or a crypto strategy, are going to be the NCRs and the MCIs of this era.
Most people investors and companies believe crypto still a niche. Uh because they can point to the current world where 99% of everything happens on traditional financial rails. And I think that uh that recency bias is actually going to constrain a lot of people. He's not blind to the risk, though. For the big money to arrive, he says crypto itself has to grow up.
What needs to change is that, you know, crypto as an industry needs to look more mature because I think anybody who's even going to do tokenized trading or tokenized equities, I think that they need to feel that they're working with partners, that their money is secure, it's not going to be hacked and disappear.
Here's his call against today's numbers. Ether is near $2,500. So, 50,000 would be about 20 times today's price. The honest risk Ether lost more than 2/3 of its value from its record to this June's low. This isn't financial advice. Would you hold Ether for a $50,000 cycle? Tell me in the comments.
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