저자: TomLee · 외국인
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이더리움은 가격이 펀더멘털에 뒤처져 있으며, 토큰화·AI 에이전트 경제가 현실화되면 네트워크 가치가 크게 올라 저평가 상태라고 주장. 2027년 기업 이익률 확대로 최고 수익 가능성, 비트코인 바닥은 10월(4년 주기)로 봄. 가격은 현재 과거 약세장 바닥 대비 회복이 수직적이지 않을 것이라 봄.
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To me, this is more signs of crypto spring because like the fundamentals are actually much stronger and the growth ramps look much bigger, but the price is lagging. If you look at the past bare market bottoms, it's not a vertical recovery in price. Probability of all those three happening in the next 3 years is like pretty close to 100%.
All of those other assets to make them monetize and digitized, you're going to have to run it on Ethereum and other other blockchains. And if Ethereum is at 300 billion, it's grossly undervalued. But here's the thing. This episode has been so much fun to record, and I'm sure you will enjoy it. However, I noticed that more than 85% of you are not subscribed to this YouTube channel.
And if there is one thing you could do to support us, please subscribe to this channel. It means a lot to us. Thank you and enjoy the episode. Welcome to the show, Tom. There's many things that we need to talk about when it comes to the markets, and that's what I wanted to point out first, which is why is crypto in general lagging behind with everything that's currently going up in the market.
Uh, you know, if you asked me a year ago if AI stocks were going to go up a lot and uh software was going to start to rise and there was like a war, I would have said those three things should have been good for crypto, right? Actually, yeah. Right. Because we'd be like, well, yeah, because AI is clearly good for crypto because crypto uh is going to be important for the agentic future.
And we'd say that well crypto stocks are correlated to software uh because it's digital money, right? Money software money and software has done well, but crypto's done badly. And uh you know, in wartime situations, we we should expect to see gold and Bitcoin do well. But instead, as you point out, crypto has done really badly.
Uh and gold's done pretty poorly, too. Uh I think um I think it tells me a couple of things. one is um I I think crypto still hasn't recovered from October 10th because that's really when the industry broke and I think there was so much deleveraging that took place there that it wiped out a lot of people.
I mean I just think people like lost money and they can't come back. Um and that takes time because people have to rebuild their savings. Uh, and I think the second is that money flows isn't explaining why stocks are going up. Because if that was the case, gold should be going up as people worry about war because there there's all this cash on the sidelines and they should be holding stores of value.
But instead, I think investors and are buying whatever goes up because there's not enough yield. Mhm. Right. So AI stocks go up and memory goes up and so it it's a it's an efficient use of money to allocate to that because you're not getting yield anywhere. Isn't it also because by definition as AI is coming in a lot of people have a very short time frame of investing appetite at this point and they just try to jump on a bandwagon to get some return and they don't have a long-term vision anymore.
Uh I mean yes and no. I mean in you know I I'm a I spent half my career studying technology and to me uh the technology story behind AI uh you know is multi-deade like you know we can see the use case and then we can see the infrastructure that needs to be built and then we see that the companies that have shortages like supply memory and power right those they're selling something that's scarce uh those stocks are doing very well because the earnings are doing well.
So I I I don't think it's irrational. Mhm. But it but the fact that but you are correct in the sense that AI if you're buying AI you should buy the whole ecosystem but people are just buying like what's in shortage right now. Yeah. Correct. Right. So that's correct. Yeah. I guess I if that's what you're saying I agree.
It's also it's also very difficult to picture 3 years from now with the fact that AI comes in and AI is exponential. So it role is going to change everyone's lives. So how can you build an investment narrative for multi-year from here not knowing how AI is going to roll out? Yeah, actually that's a great question and actually I I did work on this last night.
Um, you know, because I still write a lot of research for AR and I think if you look at the road map for AI in the next three years, I think a couple things are pretty certain. One is we're going to delegate authority to agents to be economic agents for us. Like so they'll interact with websites and carry wallets and make payments like that's guaranteed because today they can already interact with travel sites and use your account but we'll delegate authority to them.
Uh I think that autonomous capabilities of robots and cars are going to vastly increase. Mhm. And if it if you think about robots that means and pretty soon robots will have warehouse skills that exceed a human. Okay. But that also means like robots may autonomously start building entire buildings like they might do construction for us and then cars will get a lot more capable and uh and then the next step beyond that of course is that there's going to be uh agent to agent commerce or machine to machine commerce right so all that like a million machines right I mean I'd say probability of all those three happening in the next three years is pretty close to 100%.
Yeah. But today the infrastructure doesn't exist to handle all of that. Because if you have machine to machines and delegated authority, you can't rely on Amazon to control that robot, you know, because all of a sudden Amazon essentially is controlling a whole population of workers. You know, you need to have a democracy of like these agents.
And that's where I think crypto of course plays a role. Yeah, that's my like my follow-up question is like how can we build those layers that it can actually that we can have an agentic economy. Like for instance, an example, we went to consensus Miami a few weeks ago. They have the self-driving cars, the Whimos and the self-driving little robots bringing you food when you order some stuff.
But I can imagine that it's not possible to have millions of those cars driving around if there's not an infrastructure layer doing it in a proper way. So what is required to actually get to that agentic economy in your opinion? [snorts] Yeah. Well, there's going to be a two two approaches, right? Someone's going to want to control everything.
Uh so it's going to be one company that tries to set the standards for all the robots to talk because the delivery robot is not the same one that does the driving. Yeah. And that's not the one that has the payment system at the restaurant. and uh that'll be a centralized solution but then someone could hack that or uh that company could become evil.
Then I think the other way of course is uh to create a a desire for people to have a trust layer that's anonymous and that I mean that's pretty much blockchain, right? So I think that'll be the two approaches people take. I I don't know which one's going to win. I I would say that you know everybody but the monopolist would probably want a decentralized solution.
Yeah, I think so too. I mean right now in the markets it's a quite a weird market that we have in the sense that particular or in general the prices of many crypto projects are going down except for the ones that are working in AI like near is doing great or privacy Zcash is doing great. What do you make out of that sense?
Is it now finally getting into a shape of crypto markets that if there's some value acrruel within the token that it's finally getting more interest from investors? Well, uh and you hyperlid too, right? For sure. Um I think it shows you that uh the crypto models that look like corporations are doing well,
you know, like have an economic model. Yeah. uh you can use math to actually picture out what it's going to be worth in a few years, right? Yeah. But that's um the one challenge with that is that that doesn't explain like in in the equity world, which is really where I've spent most of my 35 years, that doesn't explain what makes most stocks go up.
So, in other words, like crypto and people believing that protocols that just have a fee model or burn model are the ones that go up. That's actually not the stock market world because actually like for instance for the last 20 years the Korean stock market probably had some of the best earnings and margins and it's been a crappy stock market until now.
Yeah. Uh and the US doesn't actually always have the best earnings stories but the stocks go up a lot. Like Apple hasn't really had earnings growth but the stocks gone up a lot. So it shows you that if you want to look at value capture uh the the models of like units and burn it's kind of like convenient to think that that's how you should value things but I can tell you like in my 35 years that's not how stocks are valued.
How do you like see stuff like Micronet and other stocks at this point? It's probably the point that you're trying to make right now which is like they capture a narrative and then they just start to fly away. Yeah. and well their multiples are low. So in a way uh like memory stocks in particular who've done really well
they're they have good revenue visibility. I mean the earnings growth is strong but historically they traded at low multiples because it's a famously cyclical industry. Mh. Uh so actually at the peak of prices the PE should be the lowest and and the memory cycle is so uh costly that you can lose more money during the downturn than you make in the upturn.
Uh but the thing that everyone's grappling with now is perhaps the cycle is different because there's a structural new need for memory that didn't exist before. And so that's why the stocks might be rerating is like there are some theor if we talk about stocks there are some theories that are saying well we are at the end of like this entire financial cycle we are approaching a depression uh prices are going to fall because of AI um it's going to kill the software companies or whatsoever what's your reads on like the general econ economic state at this point and like the expectations for for the stock markets broadly speaking
um I mean I think They, you know, if someone's bearish because there's technological advancement. Yeah. I mean, they should take a step back. Like, imagine someone said go back in the last 1,000 years or no, go through the entire history of American civilization, okay? and uh every era of innovation whether it was like the industrial revolution or the agricultural revolution right now it's like and there was a silicon revolution now we're having AI revolution
imagine if someone's conclusion was it's going to create the great depression every time like you'd be like you're wait so you want everyone to stay in the stone age right so uh I mean in general I think people are wrong I think AI is um arguably It's more likely it creates massive prosperity. I agree.
Than massive losses. Yeah, I agree. We need to talk about Ethereum as well. I mean, I saw a tweet of you, I think it was last week, where you combines yields with Ethereum and the fact that the youths go up, Ethereum is falling behind or there's some correlation between. What role do you see in terms of or like why is Ethereum lagging behind so much?
Is it the yields or is it the clarity act or what's the reasoning in your or your opinion? Uh yeah, I mean are you well you know I guess there's a couple ways to look at it. There's Ethereum price itself against dollars you know fundamental growth. Yeah. Or Ethereum's price against Bitcoin. Uh it hasn't done well either way.
And um I think part of it is the reason it hasn't done better against Bitcoin is that the Ethereum narrative is kind of in transition. uh because there was a you know a story a year ago where investors and crypto holders were excited about Ethereum because they saw a recovery uh in sort of the foundation's focus on enterprise engagement, you know, and so it was like the Ethereum Foundation was um trying to you know do things that would make Ethereum price go up and Um but I think in the past year there's been a bit of narrative drift because one other protocols have done a good job of like some profile wins like Canton and um Salana and I think the Ethereum Foundation is correctly though um shrinking its role like you know they are in the midst of restructuring to an extent or streamlining
um but that's a narrowing of its focus and that is helping confusing, you know, people who own Ethereum. But I do think it these aren't things that really make Ethereum less valuable. I think it's if anything, um, you know, it's it just shows you that the crypto market, it's the narrative for the whole crypto market itself hasn't been great, right?
Because Bitcoin's done poorly. And a lot of this is after October 10th. So I think investors have kind of the money flows have reversed. And I think the AI story is maybe further out than people hope. And the tokenization story like it's still really relevant because stable coins are doing well and uh banks are experimenting but we haven't seen a big transfer of actual financial services activity onto the blockchain.
Maybe that'll happen after Clarity Act. But that that means the reason Ethereum sort of has underperformed is really not as much the foundation which people think it is. It's more because the two legs of the story, AI and tokenization are maybe a little further out than people thought. Before we continue with this episode, I would like to thank my sponsors.
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Now, let's get back to the episode. What What's the narrative that Ethereum needs to catch up on? Is it going to be more of an institutional drift driving the entire layer upwards or I I think it's uh I think there's three legs to the Ethereum story. One is um I think it's in in the future people are going to really value neutrality and decentralization like they're that's going to be a virtue um because they don't want a blockchain that has like seven nodes or it's only in one country or you know there's a
two people that two entities that own 30% of it you know because that's not a decentralized protocol. Um and especially you know it's going to be especially when machine to machine interacts I think people going to want a say in um in finality and that's where blockchains are going to be important um because you don't want a company to actually control that.
Uh the second is uh tokenization. I mean it's a it's not even a question. everything that happens today in the financial system can be done on the blockchain more efficiently but all the customers are still on the traditional financial rails right so uh you know that's not going to happen overnight but I think the third story that's really bullish for Ethereum is actually been around so long and you know the the Lindy effect is a good argument that it's really time for uh like the industry to organize to supplement what the foundation does and I think it's really the only blockchain that actually is like that mature and it's it's that collaborative to be able to do that like that
you know that hasn't happened on Bitcoin you know and um and no other blockchain's been around 11 years beyond that so also I mean Ethereum is the one that's still most trusted most secure most compliant out of all the Yeah, I mean that's a constant debate with all the other chains that it's not up 100% and I'm sure that many institutions are not willing to work on those chains if it is not going to be having 100% uptime.
Yeah. So I I think that's why you know to me this is more signs of crypto spring because like the fundamentals are actually much stronger and the growth ramps look much bigger but the price is lagging right. How relevant is price for you? Uh are you looking at it at all or like Yeah, I think it matters.
Um because price, this is the thing for everything that happens in a an economy, price matters. Um like for instance, if you own a house, no one wants the house to go down in price. Correct? Like no one says, "Hey, I'm happy at my I love my house and it keeps losing 10% a year in value." Um and uh like if you're buying food, you don't want it to go up in price.
Like so price matters for everything that we do. And for an asset that especially an asset that's compounding fundamentally, you don't want the price to go down. So price matters. I mean, Ethereum shouldn't be going down. But again, it's what happens in crypto spring, right? like um if you look at the past bare market bottoms, it's not a vertical recovery in price.
It's you know there's a lot of retesting and a lot of technical levels and you know until there's really essentially escape velocity. Yeah, I think you went on stage yesterday talking about is that Ethereum basically had it in 2016 2017 with what with the first like ICO escape velocity hype and then 2021 there was another big run taking place.
Yeah. And now we're stuck in a range for 5 years waiting for the next wave to come. What do you think is going to be that one? And how long do you think that that is going to take? Oh, well, first of all, the upside's pretty big in a sense because, um, look at the look at network value. Um, you know, Bitcoin is over a trillion, you know, almost two trillion
and Ethereum is 200 something billion. Okay? And those are the two largest. So, let's say combined under two trillion. Gold is 22 trillion. The stock market is over a 100red trillion. You know, real estate's like 300 trillion. But here's the thing. All of those other assets to make them composable and uh monetized and digitized, you're going to have to run it on Ethereum and other other blockchains.
And if Ethereum is at 300 billion, it's grossly undervalued. So to me, like, you know, should Ethereum be a trillion or two or five trillion network value? Yeah, I can easily see it in the next few years. So, um I think there's a lot of upside. Yeah. Yeah. Like I'm I'm pretty confident about the price upside.
How do you maintain the conviction when the markets are turning against you? Oh, well, you know, bare markets have been everywhere. I've been doing risk assets for 35 years. I've never seen equilibrium in price, right? Prices are either cheap relative to what you think or they're expensive relative to what you think.
And it could happen for a long time. So, I mean, just uh 6 months ago, Ethereum was five almost 5,000 and now it's 1,800. Yeah. You know, has anything really changed? I mean, not really. Right. What would you tell to someone that is currently like investing into those markets that is kind of in a position of losing hope while you see a lot of fundamental growth?
I see it as well. Like, what would you tell to any of those investors? Oh, well I mean the stock market and crypto uh is going to penalize impatient investors because look at Nvidia. I mean last year when it was at stuck at 160 even early this year was at 160 and we had a lot of clients saying wow this Nvidia's done it's just so big it can't go up
and it was trading at 15 times earnings and now it's at 240. Uh you know it added what a couple trillion dollars of market cap in three months. So if you know, the impatient are the ones that actually lose. How do you see when we talk about like overvalued stocks or highly valued stocks, how do you see the upcoming IPOs coming out?
I know that Paul to the Jones has been referring to this period to the 1999 phase of like comb bubble when the biggest IPOs took place and once the unlocks kick in, it's going to be dragging down the entire stock markets. But how do you see the upcoming IPOs and their valuations? Yeah. Uh, this is actually an important point, so I'm glad you asked it.
What Paul Tudtor Jones was referring to is that in 99 he he could mark on his calendar when the market would peak. Okay? And the reason for that is not because of the date of the IPOs. There was a lot of IPOs, but it was the lockups which happened six months later. But the reason he was so bearish in 99 is [snorts] that companies were doing IPOs raising a lot of money, but their thesis was hype.
Uh I was a tech analyst back then and I saw it. You know, you IPO and the stock would go would triple on the first day of trading and it was a pre-revenue company. You know what I mean? Like they're raising money on some future business plan that had no money. Mhm. And uh so then he knows that you can't keep up the hype cycle for six months.
So six months later all their shares unlock and all the founders are going to dump the stock and that's what they did. So if you're bearish in 2026 then you because of 99 then you have to be you have to think this through. Are the companies hyped up like fake businesses? SpaceX, OpenAI, Anthropic? No, I mean they're real companies.
Are they gonna try to hype their stock for the next six months and then dump it on you? Like, no. Because they need to they need to keep raising money. So, these companies are not going to try to pump and dump. And so, I'm probably not as bearish. I mean, probably a lot of people are just comparing the the VC tokens that have gone down because of this purpose and then comparing to real companies doing some real things.
I think Elon Musk has like some sort of bonus structure where he needs to put a million people on Mars and then he gets like 400 billion. He doesn't have a pump and dump. Yeah. Yeah. That's why like SpaceX is super real. OpenAI is a very real company. Anthropic is very real. They're, you know, they're going to partner with the capital markets.
So, I I don't think it marks the top. But how are we going to attract the interest from the stock market back into crypto? Uh well it's it's a downstream story. I mean memories going to rerate. People are going back into the mag 7 and they're coming back into software because as they look into the future they realize software plays a very important implementation layer.
But when it comes to AI uh blockchain is literally your only solution. And also like with all this happening at the end of the day the Wall Street would work better on the blockchain. Like it's not even a question. It's a known fact, right? Cuz Tether makes more money as a stable coin issuer than every bank in the world except for 10.
And Jane Street, which is really proving that moving money is very profitable. Well, I mean, blockchain, you know, you can do everything that Wall Street and the banking industry does on the blockchain. So, it's there's no what I call intermodal threat. like intermodal means like is there another technology solution that makes blockchain not useful and there there isn't
and it's for both AI and for for financial services I think one of those core principles that we've seen is that there are so many institutions at these conferences that are now building stable coins building infrastructure layers in order to actually have the economy on chain what do you think is going to be or how do you see stable coins in general at this point and do we need 50 different ones
that that's TBD uh you know stable coins um you know what that that's still undetermined I can see a world where there's hyper local stable coins issued by community banks and strengthens the local community but every community bank then becomes has the capabilities of JP Morgan yeah That makes a lot of sense to me because that's how tech is supposed to work, right?
It pushes down capabilities. Uh but then I can see a world where maybe liquidity matters so much. So there's only a few stable coins or does that mean that there's going to be a big market for liquidity providers of stable coins and like and that becomes so profitable that the next citadel only makes a market in keeping stable coins at par.
Like do you mean like it can go many ways? And I kind of like see the same happening with prediction markets now. Like whether or not there's a prediction market that is actually having volume or liquidity. There will be traders jumping on a market to actually arbitrage it or to trade on it. And then you create a market by definition.
Yeah. And then if you think that through like for instance with stable coins there's one layer that they need to build up on and that is Ethereum. But then how is Ethereum going to capture the value out of that? Oh well this is where the economic model is not the correct model in the sense that why do people assign value to anything like for instance land is a good example um when you buy a house okay uh you buy land and then you build the house
okay and the guy who builds the house tries to sell it because he's like, oh, I put all this sticks and uh wood and cement and marble, but in 20 years, the house structures worth zero. In fact, uh MIT did a study on the Netherlands, [snorts] they went, you know, the canals uh because the the addresses have been the same for like 700 years.
Mhm. So, uh, he could study prices of real estate because he could look at all transactions of every home for 700 years. Uh, the only thing that goes up is the land. So, when you buy a house and it goes up, it's not gone up because the house got more valuable. It's because the land got more valuable.
That's interesting. The land is not productive. It doesn't pay you anything. It doesn't have any burn fees. In fact, you pay taxes on it. Well, if every if like you said everything happens on Ethereum, that's land. Mhm. So land is the only thing that should go up in over time. It's kind of like what has been saying about Ethereum is kind of like a city and then it just attracts all the value from everyone like like Singapore and that is how it is valuable because all the people are living there.
It's not the government taxes that they take. It's just the value sitting or TVL sitting in that city that makes it valuable. Correct. And that's where I think everyone if you buy real estate and you think it's the value is only like the tenants the value of that asset is actually the land. Yeah. It's interesting that you bring up in the Netherlands because the Netherlands have smaller issues to face at this point with the unrealized capital
and the wealth taxes. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyways, looking forward to this uh this upcoming years. I think you mentioned that 2027 is going to be a year with possibly the best returns of our lifetime. Yeah. How so? Well, 2027 is my best guess is the year corporate profit margins dramatically expand because of AI.
Yeah. Right. So like everyone says, "Hey, companies aren't making money because they spend more on AI." You know what? It it's gonna flip. Uh because I know that like at my company Funstrat, one of my companies, I have several, but we use a lot of AI uh and bots and uh we're growing without having to hire people.
So your biggest cost is if it's people uh and you can grow your top line, that's margin expansion. So I think there's going to be a a upside story to earnings next year. And of course AI if it's productive is disinflationary which means monetary p costs should be falling. So central banks should be easing
and we're past the oil. So you have dovish central banks and profits on a real basis going up. I think that's higher multiples and higher earnings. It could be the biggest stock market gains in our lifetime. Final question that I wanted to ask is um what do you think about the four year cycle? Are we getting towards the stage of a Bitcoin bottom or are we going to have another year of dragging down the entire market before we finally start to get on our feet?
Well, if it's a four year cycle, I think August is the low, right? I think it's October. Actually, everybody on social media is saying October. Uh okay. Well, Q Q3 Q4. Yeah. So, okay. If it's October, that's in four months. Yeah. It's not far away. Yeah. I mean I I think if anyone's trying to time it on this fouryear cycle I mean it's probably not a bad idea but because it seemed to have worked but you know what the the cost they have as if it's not you that's what okay so in terms of like um allocating funds I think you touch upon a good point there like once they start to turn or the market start to turn look at Ccash but look at the Ethereum last summer it just goes way.
So, how do you allocate into an asset that keeps on falling, but then all of a sudden it starts to go up and you start questioning everything? Yeah. Well, that's um you know what this is like that that means for crypto it's like preparing for a hurricane, you know, like uh do you wait to put in storm protection when the storm hits you or do you have it in place so when it go when it happens you're already prepared?
And so I think that means if there's a bull run starting, should you try to wait until the bull run starts? I mean, look, the memory story was really strong last year and for three years and no one was buying it until basically seven months ago. Yeah. And then they went straight up. Uh that's and look at gold.
People had a gold thesis for years and it and most of the gains happened in three years. So, I think you should stay invested, you know. I think so, too. And I think the fact that gold has gone up so much is going to drag Bitcoin up even higher than we probably expected right now. Um, Tom, thank you very much for joining by at this uh at the New Era of Finance.
Good luck these days at the conference. Yeah. And uh good luck with all the things that you're doing. Thank you.
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