저자: TomLee · 외국인
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암호화폐는 10년 분산투자 효과가 크며 헤지 수단으로 유효함. 이더리움은 5년 횡보 후 토큰화·스테이블코인 확산으로 상승 여력이 크고, 비트코인 적정가 25만달러 시 이더리움 약 2.2만달러 도달 가능. 금 대비 극소량으로 주식 하락 헤지 가능. 향후 금융사 절반이 네이티브 디지털로 대체될 것이라 전망.
다듬은 글
You might be so burned out because of the last crypto winter that you decided to give up on crypto. But keep in mind uh crypto has been a huge diversifier. Okay, so I want to go back 10 years and say if you had zero exposure to Ethereum 10 years ago and you just bought the S&P, you'd have $29,000. That's the first row there.
And that's starting with 100,000. If you bought just 1% of your portfolio into Ethereum 10 years ago, your total portfolio would be worth $520,000. So you doubled your total portfolio by adding 1% to Ethereum. By the way, if you added 5%, which is third row, you could see that your portfolio would be worth 1.7 million, basically eight times your return.
So crypto's been a huge diversifier when you think about 10 year cycles. If I lay that to where we think Bitcoin fair value should be, which is around 250,000, um the 2021 high average for instance would get you to 22,000 Ethereum. So at the current price of 2300 Ethereum is cheap. And of course, as you can see in crypto spring in the early part of the cycle, Ethereum doesn't really move reflexively.
So I think you're going to have plenty of time to buy crypto over the next few months. And again, if crypto winter is ended by the end of this year, we're going to see some strong moves. If your entire stock portfolio collapsed by half tomorrow, you could have completely protected yourself with less than half a percent in Ethereum.
Not 10% and not 37% like gold would require, but less than half a percent. This is coming from Tom Lee, one of Wall Street's more closely watched macro strategists. He has been early on Bitcoin before and he has been wrong before, too. But the data he is walking through right now is not easy to dismiss.
He is saying Ethereum has been consolidating for 5 years and the conditions pulling it out of that consolidation are unlike anything the previous two cycles had. Tokenization is no longer a concept. Stablecoin volumes have already crossed Visa and the firms being built natively on blockchain rails are quietly outcompeting banks that took a century to build.
Here's the full breakdown. Since the war started, crypto actually has been the best performing assets. You can see there is the best performing assets since the start of the Iran war. Okay. And the trends have turned positive. In fact, John Bollinger yesterday said his trend model turned positive and he now has a full position in Bitcoin.
All right. So, you might be so burned out because of the last crypto winter that you decided to give up on crypto. But keep in mind uh crypto has been a huge diversifier. Okay. So, I want to go back 10 years and say if you had zero exposure to Ethereum 10 years ago and you just bought the S&P, you'd have $229,000.
That's the first row there. And that's starting with $100,000. If you bought just 1% of your portfolio into Ethereum 10 years ago your total portfolio be worth $520,000. So, you doubled your total portfolio by adding 1% to Ethereum. By the way, if you added 5%, which is the third row, you can see that your portfolio be worth 1.7 million.
Basically, eight times your return. So, crypto's been a huge diversifier when you think about 10 year cycles. And it's a great hedge because another way to think of this is to say how much of another asset do you need to own to absorb a 50% loss in the S&P 500? For Ethereum, if you had a 0.4% exposure, uh you would actually completely offset a catastrophe in your equity holdings.
If you had to do this with gold, you would need to have 37% of your portfolio in gold. So, again, Ethereum has provided the same hedge protection for 1/100 the exposure. So, uh as we think about Ethereum's price, I do think it all comes down to what Bitcoin does. So, here's Ethereum's price ratio. Uh I think the long-term average is the number just to think about, which is 0.048, and the 2021 high of 0.087.
If I lay that to where we think Bitcoin fair value should be, which is around 250,000, um the 2021 high of average, for instance, would get you to 22,000 Ethereum. So, at the current price of 2,300, Ethereum's cheap. And, of course, as you can see in crypto spring in the early part of the cycle, Ethereum doesn't really move reflexively.
So, I think you're going to have plenty of time to buy crypto over the next few months. But, again, if crypto winter has ended by the end of this year, we're going to see some strong moves, just like we've been seeing memory stocks, uh currently. And, uh Ethereum's actually long consolidation. It's currently 2,300, but you can see it's been consolidating for 5 years.
Um the first consolidation ended with Ethereum making a 227x. The second consolidation that happened in Ethereum ended with a 54x. Um so, I think this third consolidation's going to be hold up because of tokenization and a gentle AR. And you know, maybe Ethereum's a 25x from here. Okay, so why do I think Ethereum and crypto is positioned to actually have a bull market?
It's really because this represents the future of money. Um Elon Musk has said the system won't use dollars as a currency in the future. It's just massive energy. He was referring to basically computing building computing space, but his point is correct that what is scarce in the future is going to be compute and energy.
The gold comparison is a number worth sitting with because gold is not some fringe hedge. Central banks hold it. Every serious allocator has had a gold position for decades. It is the most accepted store of value in institutional finance. And Lee just showed that Ethereum delivered the same crash protection as gold at 100th of the exposure.
What makes that more significant is the upside gold never offered. A 1% allocation to Ethereum 10 years ago more than doubled a standard S&P portfolio. A 5% allocation turned $100,000 into $1.7 million. Gold has never done that. And the conditions Lee is describing right now, tokenization accelerating, stablecoin volumes crossing Visa, and native digital firms are replacing legacy banks suggest the next 10 years may look nothing like the last.
Yesterday, uh LinkedIn's founder Reid Hoffman even said crypto becomes credible in an AI world. And he actually didn't think he'd ever be quoted by Caulfield. And Marc Andreessen says the the grand unification of AI and crypto agents are going to need money. And even Larry Fink, who I saw at Milken, uh the Milken Institute conference this past week, he says he believes the new asset class is going to be buying futures of compute.
Well, already a lot's happened with tokenization, um stablecoin volumes, and this is from Bitwise, um have now exceeded Visa payments. So, we already know we're past the point of Greico mass. And Grayscale had a nice report where they're projecting tokenization essentially going to be a $300 trillion market.
Now, uh up until this point, the value of the layer one, the L1, was equal to the size of the tokenized market, okay? So, if this math is holds, then the total crypto market would be 300 trillion. Um I'm not sure if that ratio will hold, but of course the argument still is true that networks that host a large share of tokenized activity, and this is from Grayscale, is going to capture the deep economic value.
So, if the total market's 300 trillion and crypto's a $2 trillion market today, I think crypto network value is going to be fairly above 2 trillion. And uh I published this before. It's just a list of things that agents, Aggi AI, why they need to run on crypto. You can actually pull this up from our presentation, which I'm sure will be available after I speak, on the Bitwise website.
Okay, so what does this all mean? Well, I think it means that the banks of the future are going to be replaced by DeFi and crypto-native companies. And let me give you an example. The most profitable bank in the world today is JP Morgan, which is projected to make $60 billion this year, which is a huge number, and they need 300,000 employees to do that.
But, let's mix in Tether and Jane Street. So, Jane Street uh is a crypto trading firm, okay? They move money just like banks move money, but they're specialized in uh moving money very quickly using computerized system. Well, they made $40 billion last year, which is almost as much money as JP Morgan, but with only 3,000 employees.
Okay? So, in other words, like they're much better with earning profit per employee or return on invested capital. And then, take a company like Tether, which only has 300 employees, and they made $15,000. So, the way I would look at it is that if you combine Tether and Jane Street, you'd have more profits than JP Morgan and only 3,300 employees.
But, the point I'm making here is that native digital companies using blockchain as settlement eliminate a lot of processes and people, and then they end up making a lot of money. So, in 10 years, uh my guess is half of all the largest financial institutions in the world will be native digital. Uh it's not a stretch.
The reason it's not a stretch is take every industry. I mean, imagine like when the internet came and someone said, "Here are the biggest newspaper companies, uh in 10 years, these will still be the same, the legacy." It obviously wasn't. They were all replaced. If you took the media, the same thing.
All these media companies in the digital world lost market share to companies like Netflix. And of course, I saw this in telecom, which is where I spent most of my career, where the wireless companies became the most important businesses, much bigger than the legacy telecom systems. Now, let's put all the pieces together.
Because what Lee is describing is not just a price move. He's describing a structural replacement of the financial system that's already underway, and most people are only going to notice it after the window is closed. Start with the efficiency argument. Tether makes $15 billion a year with 300 employees.
Jane Street made $40 billion last year with 3,000 employees. JP Morgan made $60 billion with 300,000 people. The gap between those numbers isn't a coincidence. It's what happens when you remove the layers of manual settlement, compliance overhead, and legacy infrastructure that traditional banking runs on.
The firms being built natively on blockchain today are doing to banks what streaming did to cable and what wireless did to landlines. The incumbents held on for a while, then they didn't. Now, layer the tokenization argument on top of that. Grayscale is projecting a $300 trillion tokenized asset market.
Stablecoin volumes have already crossed Visa. Real-world assets are already being settled on chain today. This isn't a future event Lee's betting on. The infrastructure is already live and already processing volume that exceeds the world's largest payment network. The question from here isn't whether the market grows.
It's about which networks capture the value when it does. And networks hosting the largest share of tokenized activity are the ones that win. That's where Ethereum's price becomes impossible to ignore. Lee's long-term ratio puts Ethereum's fair value at around $22,000 if Bitcoin reaches $250,000. It's currently sitting at $2,300.
That's a 10-to-1 gap between where it trades today and where the historical relationship between the two assets says it should be. And then there's the bigger picture Lee closes with. In 10 years, his call is that half of the world's largest financial institutions will be native digital, not adapting to blockchain, built on it from the ground up.
That's the same shift that wiped out legacy newspapers, legacy media, and legacy telecom. Every single time, people assumed the incumbents were too big to be replaced. Every single time, they were wrong. Drop your thoughts in the comments, and that's it for now. See you in the next video.
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