저자: TomLee · 외국인
요약 보기
Tom Lee는 이더리움이 향후 10~15년간 비트코인보다 더 큰 구조적 슈퍼사이클의 중심이 될 것이라고 주장한다. 근거로 스테이블코인 발행 대부분이 이더리움에서 이루어지고 있고(60% 이상), 최근 1주일간 이더리움에서 약 70억 달러 규모 스테이블코인이 발행된 점을 든다. 또한 이더리움 재무회사(BitMine)는 스테이킹 수익과 지속적 ETH 매입으로 주당 이더리움 노출을 키울 수 있다고 본다. 월가가 이더리움을 금융 인프라로 선택했다고 강조하며, 단기 변동성보다 5년 관점의 장기 투자를 권한다.
다듬은 글
Tom Lee has nailed some of the biggest trades of the last decade. Back in 2017, he told clients to buy Bitcoin when it was still under $1,000. That call made fortunes. Now, he's saying something even bolder. Ethereum isn't just another altcoin. It's the backbone of a financial super cycle that could be bigger than Bitcoin itself.
If Tom is right, we're not just talking about another crypto bull run. We're talking about the full-scale digital transformation of finance. and the companies building massive Ethereum treasuries today, they could end up being the micro strategy of this cycle or even bigger. In this video, I'll break down Tom's thesis, show you exactly why Wall Street is choosing Ethereum, and explain how Bitmine is positioning itself at the center of it all.
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Hit the first link in the description and subscribe today. Now, let's get into it. Tom Lee's credibility goes deep. In 2017, when Bitcoin was still trading under $1,000, most of Wall Street laughed it off as a scam. Tom wasn't laughing. He told his clients to buy it, and anyone who listened made life-changing returns, a 100x move as Bitcoin climbed past $100,000.
That's why his next call matters. Tom isn't chasing the last trade. He's saying Ethereum is now standing at the edge of the same kind of breakout moment. But here's the key. He doesn't see Ethereum as the next Bitcoin. He sees it as something entirely different. Bitcoin is the vault. It's digital gold, a store of value, untouchable, scarce.
Ethereum, Ethereum is the operating system for money itself. It's the programmable layer where stable coins, tokenized assets, and financial contracts are already moving. And as global financial rails shift onto blockchains, the demand for that operating system could dwarf the demand for a digital vault.
I've been involved with crypto uh since 2017 and that's when we first wrote about recommending clients buy at least a 1 to 2% position in Bitcoin and um Bitcoin was under $1,000 back then. Wow. And it's now over 100, you know, 110,000 today. Yeah. So it's been 100x return and this year uh I became uh quite constructive on Ethereum
because in in our view I I think Ethereum is one of the most important macro super cycles for the next 10 to 15 years. What Tom is saying here is massive. He isn't just floating a price target. He's pointing to a super cycle, a once- in a generation structural shift. Think about the US dollar in 1971 when it left the gold standard.
That single decision forced Wall Street to rebuild the entire financial system around fiat dollars. New products, new markets, new infrastructure. And once those rails were laid, there was no going back. That's the comparison Tom is making with Ethereum today. Wall Street has chosen its chain. They're not building stable coins, tokenized treasuries, and nextgen settlement systems on Bitcoin.
They're building them on Ethereum. And if history is any guide, once the financial system changes its rails, it doesn't shift back. One of the biggest reasons Tom Lee is so bullish isn't just Ethereum itself. It's the rise of Ethereum treasury companies. Think Micro Strategy in the last cycle, but this time for ETH.
These are publicly traded firms that raise capital, buy massive amounts of Ethereum, and in doing so compound exposure per share for investors. Here's why this matters. Owning Ethereum directly is static. If you buy 10 ETH today, you'll still have 10 ETH a year from now. But when you own a share of a treasury company, your effective claim on Ethereum keeps growing as the company raises new money and adds more ETH to its balance sheet.
That means your exposure expands without you lifting a finger. Imagine someone could say, "I could buy $4 worth of Ethereum or buy one Bit share." as of July um as of August 24th, Bitine held $40 of Ethereum per share. So, it rose by 10 times. But if someone bought the Ethereum itself or they bought the Ethereum ETF, they'd still only have $4 of Ethereum per share.
So, you can see that a treasury company is growing your Ethereum holdings per share. That's why Micro Strategy stock did better than Bitcoin. In August 2020, Micro Strategy stock was $13. Today, it's $335. It's gone up by more than 25 times. The price of Bitcoin has gone from 10,000 to 110,000. So, it's gone up by 11 times, but Micro Strategy stocks gone up by 25 times.
And that's because Micro Strategy as a treasury company has grown your Bitcoin per share. And Bitmine is growing your Ethereum held per share every week. It's growing by roughly 50 cents per day. This is the game changer. If you had simply bought ETH in July, you'd still have the same number of coins today.
But if you bought Bit Mine stock, your ETH per share exploded 10fold in just weeks. That's why Micro Strategy stock outperformed Bitcoin by more than double in the last cycle. It wasn't just tracking BTC's price. It was multiplying it because Michael Sailor kept raising capital and adding to his treasury.
Now, Bitmine is doing the exact same thing for Ethereum. And here's where it gets even more powerful. Unlike Bitcoin, Ethereum can earn staking yield. That means treasury companies don't just grow exposure by raising capital. They can also generate steady income by staking their ETH. That income can then be reinvested or used to fund even more purchases, creating a flywheel effect.
It's like Bitcoin's corporate treasury playbook, but on steroids. This is the crux of Tom's argument. Bitcoin is incredible at one thing, storing value. It's digital gold. It's the vault where you keep wealth safe from debasement. But when it comes to actually building financial products, things like stable coins, tokenized bonds, digital equities, or even tokenized real estate, you need more than a vault.
You need programmability. You need smart contracts. And that's something Bitcoin simply wasn't designed for. Bitcoin was never meant to carry complex financial logic. It's simple. It's elegant, but it's deliberately limited. Ethereum, on the other hand, was built for exactly this use case. It's the operating system for programmable money.
And that's why Wall Street isn't looking for digital gold. Wall Street is looking for the base layer it can use to rebuild the financial system itself. The institutions don't just want a hedge against inflation. They want the rails for tokenized dollars, bonds, ETFs, and equities. And increasingly the evidence shows that capital is flowing to Ethereum to build those rails.
This is a a dramatic moment where the financial system is essentially moving everything onto a digital platform. The platform that you need, the blockchain, a public chain needs to be one that has smart contracts. So it's not going to be built on Bitcoin. Wall Street is choosing to do this on Ethereum.
That one sentence should stop every investor in their tracks. Wall Street is choosing Ethereum, not Salana, not Bitcoin. Ethereum. This isn't retail hype. It's institutional plumbing. It's the deep infrastructure layer that nobody notices until it's already built. And once the financial system chooses a chain, it doesn't go back and forth.
Ethereum is becoming the backbone for the next era of finance. And once trillions of dollars of tokenized assets, stable coins, and securities are settled on ET, that demand is locked in forever. Stable coins are the Trojan horse of crypto adoption. They're not speculative. They're practical. They solve real problems.
Merchants love them because fees are lower than Visa. Instead of paying 2 to 3% on every transaction, they can accept stable coin payments at a fraction of the cost and without the risk of chargebacks. Consumers love them because it's cheaper and faster to hold a USDC wallet than to keep money in a traditional bank account.
And banks themselves, they're warming up to stable coins because they're backed by US treasuries, making them one of the single most profitable financial products in existence today. And here's the kicker. Most of them run on Ethereum. Stable coins have to run on a blockchain, right? So, Tether, USDT and USDC, they operate on top of an existing blockchain and the majority of stable coins, over 60% are operated on Ethereum.
Oh, so Ethereum is where most of the stable coins are actually operating. And it and 36% of the fees for Ethereum today come from stable coins. Oh, and Um there's a stat that was just published over the weekend, but in just the last 7 days um about 7 billion of stable coins were created on Ethereum.
Wow. Which is greater than the amount of stable coins on Salana over the past 5 years. So more stable coins creations are taking place on Ethereum. So I'd say if you're betting on stable coins, yeah, you should bet on Ethereum. Yes. This is why stable coins are the killer app. They're not just a use case.
They're recurring, utilitydriven demand for Ethereum block space. Every time someone mints USDC settles a payment or moves capital across borders, Ethereum captures value. Just look at the numbers. $7 billion in new stable coins minted on Ethereum in a single week. More than Salana has managed in its entire history.
That's not speculation. That's real world adoption at scale. And it's growing fast. Stable coins already represent nearly $300 billion in circulation. And US regulators are projecting that number could climb into the trillions within this decade. If that happens, Ethereum won't just be hosting crypto apps.
It will be the backbone of the global payment system. That's why Tom calls stable coins the hidden jet fuel of Ethereum's super cycle. They're the on-ramp for mainstream adoption, and they're quietly locking in Ethereum's dominance as the default settlement layer for global finance. Here's where Ethereum pulls even further ahead of Bitcoin.
Corporate treasuries don't just hold ETH, they can stake it. And staking changes the entire equation. It transforms Ethereum from a speculative asset into a yield generating one. For a corporate balance sheet, that's a gamecher. Why? Because treasuries aren't just betting on price appreciation anymore.
They're earning a steady income stream in addition to the ETH itself going up in value. That's something Bitcoin simply cannot offer. The Ethereum is a proofofstake blockchain. So, Ethereum treasury companies actually earn a staking yield. So, um for instance, the Bitine roughly $9 billion of Ethereum held if it was staked would generate about $300 million in pre-tax net income.
Wow. Think about that. $300 million in income every year without selling a single coin. That makes Bitmine a company that didn't even exist in this form a few months ago. One of the most profitable firms in the United States just by holding and staking ETH. And unlike Bitcoin, where treasuries can only rely on price gains, Ethereum treasuries enjoy two compounding engines at once.
the growth of ETH per share as they raise capital and buy more. And the cash flow from staking yield that keeps paying out regardless of market volatility. It's this dual engine model that makes Ethereum treasuries so powerful. Price growth plus income. And it's why Tom Lee believes the Bitmine playbook could dwarf what Micro Strategy did for Bitcoin.
Tom calls this the power law. In competitive systems, the largest players don't just stay large, they actually become exponentially stronger. It's the opposite of a level playing field. Size compounds. That's exactly what happened with Micro Strategy in the last Bitcoin cycle. Once it established itself as the biggest corporate Bitcoin holder, it attracted more attention, more liquidity, and more capital.
And every dollar it raised gave it even more Bitcoin per share, which in turn pushed its stock higher, which made raising new money even easier. That flywheel created a feedback loop that left smaller treasury competitors in the dust. Now the same dynamic is unfolding with Ethereum treasuries. In any competitive system, the larger players
start to have a disproportionate benefit. And that's why Micro Strategy's valuation is growing because it's the largest. So it's not the smallest company that gets the highest valuation, it's the largest that gets the highest valuation. And that's the same with Bitcoin as well. Correct. Because the next largest crypto treasuries is again one-third the size.
And every week the distance is growing. This is why scale matters. The bigger a treasury becomes, the easier it is to raise capital. The easier it is to raise capital, the more ETH it can buy. And the more ETH it buys, the more ETH per share it can offer investors. Each step strengthens the next, tilting the entire game board toward the leaders.
Bit is now the second largest crypto treasury in the world behind only Micro Strategy. And that gap, it's closing fast. Every week, Bitmine adds more ETH to its balance sheet, pulling further ahead of other Athereum treasuries and creeping closer to Micro Strategies crown. The power law means this isn't just a race, it's a snowball.
Once a company like Bitmine establishes dominance, momentum compounds. And that's why Tom believes Bit could become to Ethereum, what Micro Strategy became to Bitcoin, only bigger, faster, and potentially even more profitable. Of course, none of this matters if you get shaken out by short-term volatility.
Crypto never moves in a straight line, and Ethereum is no exception. But Tom's advice here is blunt. Think in years, not months. The same skepticism that kept his friends out of Bitcoin in 2017 is keeping them out of Ethereum today. Back then, people laughed at the idea of Bitcoin breaking $10,000. Today, those same voices are saying Ethereum hasn't done anything in 5 years and using that as an excuse to ignore it.
So, my friends that are in the financial business, they are the ones who missed Bitcoin because in 2017, their knowledge of the world is traditional stocks, traditional bonds. They didn't think crypto made any sense at all. So, they were very skeptical of Bitcoin. And in fact, many ridiculed um my views about it.
Of course, now they acknowledge it was a great idea. I think they'll regret it. Yeah. But now when I tell my friends about Ethereum, yeah, they my close friends still do the same thing. They're like, Ethereum, it hasn't done anything for 5 years. Why would I buy Ethereum now? So most my closest friends are still very skeptical.
Wow, that's very very interesting. Actually, it's surprising. So imagine your close friend who are working in the traditional bank wants to start investing in crypto this year. We have like 5 months or 6 months left. What's the main thing they should be careful of and what advices would you give? Well, number one, if anyone's buying crypto, they have to use a long-term time horizon.
Mhm. So they shouldn't worry about the price one month from now, but they should think about where it is 5 years from now. And that's how we've always approached it. When we wrote about Bitcoin, we always wrote about prices 5 years from now. Mhm. And that's why even today, I think Bitcoin can still get to a million.
Wow. And it's about 100,000 now. That's the mistake. The same people who laughed at Bitcoin at $1,000 are laughing at Ethereum today. But history shows us what happens next. Skepticism always comes first. Conviction always comes later when the price is already 10x higher. Tom's point is crystal clear.
You can't judge Ethereum by what it does in the next month. You have to look 5 years out. If Bitcoin still has room to 10x, Ethereum, with its stronger utility, staking yield, and treasury amplification, has the potential to 50x. And here's the kicker. That upside is asymmetric. Your downside is limited to the capital you risk, but your upside, if Tom's right, the payoff could be life-changing.
The kind of trade that, in his words, only comes along once or twice in a lifetime. So, the real risk isn't short-term volatility. The real risk is not being positioned when the super cycle plays out. Bitcoin is digital gold, the vault of the system. But Ethereum is the operating system itself, the foundation on which finance is being rebuilt.
That's why Wall Street, stable coin issuers, and corporate treasuries are all converging on ETH. Treasury companies like Bitine are the accelerators. They don't just track ETH, they compound it. Every capital raise adds more ETH per share. Staking generates income without selling a coin. And thanks to the power law, the biggest players get stronger every single week.
Stable coins are the hidden jet fuel. They're practical, profitable, and already the most widely adopted crypto product. Billions are being minted on Ethereum every week, embedding ETH deeper into the global financial system. Put it all together, and Tom's message is simple. This isn't just another bull run.
It's a super cycle. And in his view, Ethereum is bigger than Bitcoin. If you enjoyed this breakdown and want more content like this, make sure to one and thanks for watching.
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