저자: TomLee · 외국인
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암호화폐 바닥 형성 가능성을 거시 요인(근원CPI 마이너스, CLARITY Act 불확실성, AI 쏠림 자금 이탈 가능성, 금융섹터 약세)으로 설명하고, 1987년 S&P 회복 유사성을 근거로 8월 이더리움 2200 목표를 제시. 장기적으로는 토큰화·AI 에이전트 결제·정산 레이어로서의 ETH 가치를 근거로 2.5만~25만 달러 가능성 언급.
다듬은 글
$250,000 for Ethereum. This figure did not come from a retail trader who was promoting the chart on social media. It came from Joe Luben, one of the people who actually created Ethereum, separate from the Ether Realized research group. Tom Lee spent his latest market update breaking down why they could both be on the right track.
And it starts where you wouldn't expect it, not on schedule. Inflation data, a blocked bill in Congress, and a comparison with 1987 . Lee has built a reputation for linking cryptocurrency price dynamics to the broader macroeconomic picture. And this update is one of its clearest yet. It explains why the current drop is structurally different from 2022, why a bottom may already be forming, and where the true long-term ceiling for Ethereum actually lies.
So, let's take a look at what exactly he laid out. This is how he formulates the current state of affairs. So, the bond market has canceled four cuts since 2026. This is a significant increase. With that in mind, I think the bond market will start to lower prices this year. One of them is that inflation is quite weak.
Look at the core consumer price index for June, which was released on July 14. This indicator for the base index for the month was negative. The US actually had deflation. It's been a long time since the corporate market has experienced deflation. And I think overall we think the inflation story is much weaker than many people think.
The second is the Law of Clarity. This is an important law. It is in a state of limbo that provides a basis for us to know which regulatory body can set national policy on cryptocurrencies. In this case, it's the CFTC, but markets are predicting only a 44% chance that the Clarity Act will be signed into law, which is below 50%.
Industry insiders believe it is much higher. For example, the vice president of Coinbase believes we have reached the one-yard mark, and Senator Cynthia Loomis, who is working tirelessly on this, believes we are approaching the point where they are going to land the plane. The third factor is the fear of missing out (FOMO) on artificial intelligence (AI ).
In case you haven't noticed, many AI stocks have performed very well , and 86% of all venture dollars this year have gone to AI. This is draining money from cryptocurrencies. But the situation may change. For example, Chimat and CNBC say, “I think you’re going to start to see the costs and benefits of AI shift a little bit .” Well, when it starts to cool down, it's good for cryptocurrency.
The fourth factor is that the crypto sector depends on the financial sector as its object. And if you look at the S&P 500 sectors since the beginning of the year, the leaders since the beginning of the year are things like memory, technology, semi-finished products, energy and materials, all of which are related to the artificial intelligence supply chain.
And the financial sector is one of the worst sectors since the beginning of the year. So, this acts as a headwind for cryptocurrency, but we believe that crypto spring is here, and it's not a direct employment move. Demarc Analytics and Tom Demarc, our cryptocurrency market buying timing advisor , believe that everything seems to be in place for a market bottom to be reached, and that Ethereum's risk premium is increasing.
These are quite constructive comments. He refers to the 1987 analogue. Ethereum today is very similar to the S&P in 1987, and as you can see, in 1987, the S&P recovered nicely over the next month. This means 2200 for Ethereum in August. Before we continue, if this kind of distribution is useful to you, click subscribe.
This costs nothing and helps the channel reach more people who want their crypto analysis based on real data. Now the bond market has started pricing in two rate cuts this year. The war in the Middle East and significant spending on artificial intelligence changed this expectation, and traders almost completely abandoned the four declines.
This is a real boost, and it's the main reason why cryptocurrency struggled in 2026, even without the kind of forced deleveraging that defined 2022. But June's core inflation figures actually turned negative for the month. The first indicator of outright deflation in the core CPI in a long time. This is important because it gives the Fed room to return to its uncertainty later this year.
Then there’s the Clarity Act, a bill that would give the CFTC clear authority to regulate cryptocurrencies, instead of leaving the industry stuck in a turf war between agencies. Markets are predicting a chance of its passage of just 44%, but people closer to the process, including a sitting senator who has worked on the bill for years, describe it as almost complete.
It is worth paying attention to this gap between public odds and insider trust. And on the technical side, Tom Demar, whose work on market timing has a long history, interprets the current situation as forming a bottom with a target for Ethereum in August, built on a direct comparison to how the S& P recovered from its own 1987 low .
None of this guarantees that the turnaround is here, but it is a more multi-level case than a market decline, so it should be near the bottom. And this is something to think about before moving on to what comes next. Defining the bottom only answers half the question. The more important question is what Ethereum will actually become after formation.
And it is here that Lee moves from defining time to structure. Now you might say: well, let's say cryptocurrency is bottoming out . You also have to believe in the future. And I think the future market for Ethereum is exponential. Here's some wisdom from Warren Buffett in his 1987 letter to shareholders.
He said: "The market may ignore the success of a business for a while, but it will eventually validate it." Well , ETH is currently, I think, in phase 1.0, and it's moving to 2.0. But in phase 1.0, Ethereum had an ICO boom, an NFT boom, which brought Ethereum to almost 5000 in 2022. And then, in the last 18 months, we had ETFs and stablecoins.
and it raised Ethereum to almost 5000, but that was the 1.0 level and now Ethereum is in a decline. A lot of people will look at ETH here and say, look, the upper limit of the range is 5,000, and they don't see any further growth. But I disagree. I think people are angry, giving up on Ethereum's bottom here.
Why am I saying this? Well , unlike the cryptocurrency market of 2022, Wall Street is building on Ethereum. There have been significant victories in tokenization over the past 12 months. Biddle from Black Rockck, Mooney from JP Morgan, Securitizes continues to have great success. Ono Finance too, and there were many wins at the second level.
Robin Hood blockchain, Coinbase, Krakens, Inc., but perhaps the most notable breakthrough is the Robin Hood blockchain built at Arbitum this year. Vlad, who runs Robin Hood, believes that everything that runs on traditional rails will eventually become tokenized onchain. We also hold this view, but this is an important matter.
And the Robin Hood network, which just launched in July, has already processed more volume than many cryptocurrency exchanges. And on July 9, it was 560 million. It has already exceeded a billion as of today. In fact , as we note, the Robin Hood network is important because it uses ETH as its own gas token.
Transaction fees are denominated in ETH and are calculated on Ethereum L1. Guess what? It sounds like ETH is money. That's why I think it's important. The Robin Hood network makes money on ETH. And here are a few more points, but let me emphasize them again. The Robin Hood network uses ETH as its own gas token.
Lee borrows a line from Warren Buffett's 1987 letter to shareholders. The idea is that markets may ignore real progress for a while before eventually pricing it in. His thesis is that Ethereum has already gone through one full cycle of this. The ICO boom, then the NFT boom, then the wave of spot ETFs and stablecoins.
Each of them pushed Ethereum to around $5,000, and each time it fell. He calls this Phase 1.0, and his argument is that people who write off Ethereum at these levels are mistakenly taking the end of one chapter as the end of history. What makes this drop different from 2022 is who is actually building on blockchain now.
BlackRock's tokenized fund, JP Morgan's Onyx platform, and Ono Finance are moving real assets onto the blockchain, rather than experimenting at its edges. A prime example is the new Robin Hood blockchain, built on Arbitum and directly backporting to Ethereum. It uses ETH itself to pay transaction fees, meaning that every transaction that goes through it creates direct demand for the asset .
This is a significantly different type of use than speculative trading volume. This ETH functions as a working capital within the system, not just a token that people bet on. This distinction between ETH as a speculative asset and ETH as something that institutions actually need to hold to operate is the thread that connects everything else in this update.
So , if the first phase was about proving that the technology works, what will the next phase actually look like when it's complete? Lee reaches out to free companies that almost everyone already knows. Let's look at Amazon as an analogy. Okay, Amazon 1.0 led to Amazon from 1998 to 2010, okay, a 13-year period, stuck at a peak of $6 for 12 years.
And in the middle of that period, AWS was launched, which was a huge event because over the next 12 years, AWS became massive with Prime Day, Amazon Studios, and their specialization in artificial intelligence. But look what happened to the shares on Amazon 2.0. The shares rose from $ 6 to $241. Look at Nvidia and their transition from company 1.0 to 2.0.
Well, during this 17-year period listed here, Nvidia had the CUDA platform , uh, which is actually an important programming language. This is what is still used for graphics processors . This is the main reason why Nvidia has a near monopoly on high-end AI chips. And then, in 2014, they launched, or their chips were used by cryptocurrency miners.
However, Nvidia shares actually continued to peak at one dollar. Nvidia 2.0 chat GBT was launched in late 2022. Blackwell was announced in 2024 and the rest is history, and their price increased from $1 to $197 to almost 200 times when Nvidia went to 2.0. And the last example I'll give you, as the addressable markets expand, is JP Morgan.
Okay, JP Morgan over this 30-year period. Okay, er, transformed. Now keep in mind that the JP Morgan of today is not the JP Morgan that saved America in 1907. In fact, JP Morgan today started out as Chase. Chase acquired Chemical and Manufacturers Handover Bank. In 2000, 2000, Chase acquired JP Morgan, and then over the next, um, 15 years acquired Bear Sterns, Bank One, Washington Mutual.
But despite all that, you can see these acquisitions here. JP Morgan got stuck and peaked around $70. But with the acquisition of JP Morgan and Bear Sterns, Chase became a global bank, a truly global bank. And as you can see, 2.0 unfolded over the next 15 years, and JP Morgan stock went from $58 to $334.
So you can see when the target market goes up, the price of the asset goes up. And sometimes it takes time. Well, that's why I'm talking about ETH because ETH 2.0 is a period where Ethereum not only becomes central to many growth vectors, but ETH as an asset becomes money. So the first thing that will drive this is that we are in a new fundamental area.
The Ethereum Foundation, which is a non-profit organization, is still a central part of Ethereum core, but that's not the only story. In fact, today, given the regulations, it may no longer be necessary to have non-profit foundations. The second is genetic AI, which is becoming an important story in cryptocurrency.
Now you may ask, how can this be cryptohistory? Let me explain. I think in the next few years there will be something that people are talking about called the " uncanny valley of riches." And let me explain. Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori published an essay called "The Uncanny Valley" in 1970. He was referring to the hypothesis that you feel anxious when a robot looks too human.
Okay, I think this will happen in the agent world. And what do I mean by that ? Well, let's consider that the x-axis is the percentage of wealth created by AI, and the y-axis is your satisfaction with AI. AI today can perform complex reasoning, multitasking, and agent-based trading. Overall, this is good progress and we are pleased.
It actually helps our lives, and it may start to have a machine economy, and it may be a growing share of income, but we will still be satisfied because we are making more money. But at some point, AI may be richer than us. The Amazon and Nvidia comparison really works here. Amazon spent 12 years trading at a stock price of around $6 before AWS Prime and its studio business grew into something the market finally had to revalue, and the stock rose from $6 to $241 .
Nvidia's history is even longer . CUDA was launched in the mid-2000s. Its chips were adopted by crypto miners years later, and the stock was still stuck at around a dollar for most of that period. Only after the advent of generative AI did Nvidia grow from $1 to almost $200. In both cases, the technology was already working long before the price caught up with it.
Then Lee moves on to something more unusual, an idea he calls the uncanny valley of riches. The original theory of the uncanny valley states that people feel uneasy when something looks almost human, but not quite. His version applies the same discomfort to money. Now, AI that helps you trade or solve problems seems like progress.
But he points to a future where AI agents could start generating more revenue than the humans who own them. And that's the moment when it stops feeling like a tool and starts feeling like something you work for, not the other way around. It is this discomfort, he believes, that is why AI agents will need their own financial rails, ones that don't go through a bank or government that could shut them down .
Marc Andre described it as the future convergence of AI and cryptocurrency, autonomous agents that need to store and move money without human approval of each transaction. This is not a small use case. This is a new category of demand that no one factored into the price of Ethereum a few years ago. This is a psychological argument.
Here is the structural one. And this is the part that is actually related to the target price. And that's why Marc Andre of A16Z said that the big merger is AI and cryptocurrency. AI agents will need money. And that's why we argue that blockchain is a barrier between humans and AI. First of all, if it's not blockchains, I don't think we'll trust governments.
We wo n't trust financial institutions and we won't trust technology companies because they all thought that all three of those aspects could be taken over by artificial intelligence. I think it's a smart contract blockchain, and if that's the case, then we'll be happy when artificial intelligence can generate a lot of revenue, because humanity will ultimately win.
The third driving force behind ETH 2.0 is that ETH will be a settlement layer for finance. We have already seen many Ethereum spin-offs from the foundation, ETH labs, Ethereum institutions, ETH systems that are driving this future. And finally, I think we will conclude that ETH is money, because if you are going to hold it for transaction fees and as working capital, that is what makes ETH money.
Yes, and I want to jump to this point because you might be skeptical about this future regarding the role of cryptocurrency, but let me show you a quick snippet. This has been going on since 1995 . Bill Gates talks to David Letterman about the internet, but you have to listen to it. This is about a minute about it.
What about this internet thing? Do you know anything about this? Of course. What the hell is this ? Well, it has become a place where people post information. So everyone can have their own homepage. There are companies there, the latest information. It's wild what's happening. You can send people emails.
Uh, this is a big novelty. Yes. But you know, uh, it's easy to criticize something you don't fully understand, and that's my position. Let's. But I remember a few months ago there was this kind of big breakthrough that on the internet or some computer deal they were going to broadcast a baseball game.
You can listen to a baseball game on your computer. And I just thought to myself, is the radio saying anything? Do you understand what I mean? I just...There's a difference. There is a difference. It's not a huge difference. What's the difference? But you can, you can listen to a baseball game whenever you want.
Good. Also. Oh, I understand. So, it's stored in one of your memory transactions, and then you come back to it later , which you talked about earlier. Yes. Do tape recorders have any meaning for you? Hmm, yeah, I just don't know how you can... 95. In the early days of the internet, people were skeptical, and I think people will be skeptical about a future where you need cryptocurrency to protect you from AI, and where ETH is money because it's the future of payment rails.
But just follow me in this future. How much is Ethereum worth? If it costs 1800 today, is it worth 25,000, 75,000 or even more ? Well, Joe Luben, one of the co-founders of Ethereum, believes that Ethereum will grow 100 times when this future arrives. That's 250,000. And Etherealiz published a great article earlier this year about the path to 250,000.
But they view Ethereum as productive money. Where will I end up? I don't know. But let's say it's 2.0, like Amazon, Nvidia, and JP Morgan . Radical growth potential from here. So, uh, but again, 1800 250,000 is about 100x. The logic is that if AI agents are to eventually handle significant portions of commerce, humans will need a level of computation that no one can quietly take over or shut down.
Not a bank, not a government database, not a technology platform. A smart contract blockchain is the only thing on this list that operates under fixed rules, rather than at the discretion of institutional institutions. Whether or not you believe every part of this approach, it is a consistent explanation for why serious money continues to appear in Ethereum rather than in traditional closed systems of finance.
This is where the target price comes back in. Ethereum is worth around $1,800 today. Lee identifies a range of $25,000 to $ 75,000 and above, dwelling on Joe Luben’s public call for a 100x increase to $250,000. If fully confirmed, this is a figure that Ethereum has arrived at independently, thanks to its own research into Ethereum as a productive source of revenue.
Contrast this with previous comparisons of Amazon and Nvidia, which underwent their own multiple repricings after their addressable market actually expanded, and the form of the argument becomes clearer. DeMar's short-term goal for August is really just the first rung on the much longer ladder that Lee describes.
So, what's the deal here? The initial question was whether $250,000 for Ethereum is a real thesis, or just a figure published in the headlines. What Lee has actually built is a case with several independent grounds supporting it. A macro- background that is imperceptibly becoming less hostile than the headlines claim.
Real institutional infrastructure, not speculation, is stopping at Ethereum through names like BlackRock, JP Morgan, and Robin Hood . A new category of demand arising from artificial intelligence agents who need programmable money without permissions. And also the historical pattern seen in Amazon, Nvidia, and JP Morgan, where assets can remain in a range for years before a structural shift finally forces the market to revalue them all at once.
None of this makes $250,000 a guarantee. But it explains why some of the most connected people in the field are willing to say it out loud . The next few months, starting with this August goal, will be the first real test of whether this cycle will unfold as he describes. See you next time.
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