저자: TomLee · 외국인
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이더리움 강세론 주장. 스테이블코인·월가 토큰화·AI 에이전트 결제 수요로 ETH는 현재 대비 상승 여지가 크며, 사이클상 BTC 로컬 바닥은 근접했다고 봄. 1~2년 내 ETH 1만 달러 돌파 가능성을 언급. 다만 자막 기준으로 명시적 1~3개월 방향 예측은 제한적.
다듬은 글
If we look 1–2 years ahead and know that stablecoins have pushed Ethereum to 5,000, but now we have not only AI driving demand for crypto and Wall Street actually building new settlement rails, but also the fact that crypto is in the middle of a “bullish” cycle, I would say that being in a new “bullish” cycle means that Ethereum should be above 5,000.
But what do we add to that, given the tokenization on Wall Street and AI? So, I think that Ethereum can easily cross the 10,000 mark during this time. Hello everyone, welcome to the Everyday Finance channel. After a sudden rally that saw Ethereum rise from $1,900 to $ 2,600 and bring half a trillion dollars back into the market, Tom Lee argues that the move is the start of a major trend, not a temporary trap.
While prices remain flat due to general market fear, fundamentals such as the rise of institutional tokenization, adoption on Wall Street, and the development of AI agents that require non-traditional payment systems have been strengthening for several months. The recent price spike was triggered by the largest short liquidation in cryptocurrency history as overly bearish traders were forced to close their positions, creating a powerful upward momentum.
When asked whether investors should buy now or wait for a pullback, Lee notes that historically, crypto makes almost all of its profits in just 10 key days per year. This means that waiting for the perfect moment to enter is often much more expensive than buying early, so getting involved in the market immediately is critical as four major catalysts could push prices significantly higher by the end of the year.
First of all, as you know , um...when there 's a movement that I think is going to be a huge shift in crypto, everyone is going to play an important role. And Bitmain wants to play, I think, two important roles. You know, one of them is to act as an important stabilizing force, and I think in this "cryptozyme" we've proven that, because we've been buying Ethereum for 60 weeks straight.
We have never had to sell it, and we are not in a position to ever be forced to do so. And we funded the Ethereum Foundation's daughter projects so they could implement their plans without worrying about fundraising. Um, and of course we want to outline the vision. And you know, because that was actually the foundation of my successful career on Wall Street for 30 years—I was actually outlining to investors the long-standing theories and views that we have.
Well, that's the basis for Granny Shots, our family of ETFs at Fundstrat, which have proven to be very successful. And of course, that's what we've created in the equity world . So, if it is useful and important for Ethereum, we will be happy to continue playing this role. But, as you rightly noted, Ethereum is something special.
There are so many talented people out there, and we want to make sure no one leaves the ecosystem for the wrong reasons. But we also want to engage the right people and tell the right stories to get businesses using Ethereum. So we are happy to play this role. But, you know, in a way, it's an unofficial role, David.
This is not what we are striving for, and there are no electoral processes here. You are largely right, because AI is an extremely exciting story that brings people a lot of money. It also brings profits to institutional investors. This raises the bar for everything else. Just imagine: you come to a meeting where one wants to talk about AI stocks and the other wants to talk about real estate.
Someone will definitely not pay attention to the second part of the meeting. So you are right. But as the story of AI evolves, it's important to think about the themes that stem from it. Because this is where mistakes can be made in resource allocation. Many people thought that software was a thing of the past.
But in reality, software is a derivative of AI. In fact, AI will bring many benefits to these companies. That's why the shares of many software companies are now starting to rise. Cryptocurrency is a very important story that emerges from the field of AI. The stronger AI becomes , the more relevant cryptocurrency becomes.
That's the main point, is n't it? In fact, the more AI develops, the more important cryptocurrency becomes. So, crypto is definitely a derivative story of AI. But in terms of time , I think you're right. While AI was at its peak, things changed, but at the beginning of the year, no one wanted to own anything else.
Now that is changing. I'll put it this way: it's the same as talking about technical analysis. There are many people who invest in the stock market and say, "I never look at the charts." "I'm not interested in technical analysis." However, technical strategists determined the peaks and bottoms of the market with amazing accuracy, you know?
So, this means that a true investor, even if he only cares about fundamental indicators, should never ignore technical analysis, because it is the techniques that correctly identify reversal points. And, um, the same will happen with cryptocurrency cycles. I don't know why a cryptocycle exists, but I don't want to ignore the fact that cryptocycles can exist.
I think we've hit rock bottom. In fact, if you look at past crypto cycles, the price low didn't quite coincide with Bitcoin's 1064 days . So, um, but there was a local minimum. Therefore, I think it is quite likely that Bitcoin has already reached its local bottom. And then a new local minimum appears, but it is not lower than the current one.
And then, looking back, everyone will say, "Oh yeah, because they had to adjust for the S&P 500." And you know, it's possible, or it's going to be the ratio of Bitcoin to Nasdaq, which is actually a minimum. So the answer is: I think we're 90 % of the way to the bottom in terms of time, let's say 95% in terms of time and 90% in terms of price.
I would say that unless you are a true genius, buying now will be at a better price than trying to buy a month after hitting the bottom. If we look at the 1–2 year perspective and know that stablecoins have pushed Ethereum to 5,000. But now we have not only AI driving demand for crypto and Wall Street building new crypto-based settlement rails, but also the fact that we are in the middle of a bull cycle, I would say that the very fact of being in a new cycle means that Ethereum should be above 5,000.
But if you add in the tokenization from Wall Street and AI, then I think Ethereum could easily exceed 10,000 during that period. As AI agents begin to manage assets and make autonomous financial decisions, relying on traditional human-centric payment systems like Visa or JP Morgan poses great risks, as these legacy networks lack the speed and built-in controls to prevent a fraudulent agent from draining your account.
Cryptocurrency solves this problem through its architecture: Ethereum, the world's largest and most liquid smart contract network, uses transparent and immutable rules to set strict limits on agent spending while maintaining robust human control . This is not far-fetched science fiction at all; This transition is already underway, with companies like Cloudflare launching stablecoin wallets for autonomous agents, preparing for a reality where the majority of online activity is predicted to be agent-based within 4 years.
In the next crypto cycle, we believe there will be two big trends: mass tokenization of many assets and a rethinking of what counts as money. I mean, once you start digitizing stocks and bonds, there will be perpetual contracts that can be bets on outcomes and factors, as well as prediction markets.
What counts as money will become very, very blurred. For example, computing power as an asset class is a real thing that will happen, and I'm sure a lot of it will happen on blockchains and smart contracts. So, this is one of the areas of development. The second direction we see, of course, is a significant rethinking of the levels of calculations through artificial intelligence systems.
And if you look at the last few crypto cycles, a lot of money has been made from organizations created from scratch that didn't exist in the previous cycle. For example, Polymarket, Kalshi, and Hyperliquid did not exist in the last cycle, but they were created in the most recent one. So Bitmain believes that there will be many structures worth anywhere from $1 billion to $10-20 billion in cumulative revenue, created by projects that appear tomorrow or even started today in the next crypto cycle.
And that's why we are actively focusing our resources on this . So, now we call them "moonshots." I don't know what we'll call them in the future, but we're trying to find as many ideas as possible, working on our own concepts , working closely with financial institutions or existing crypto companies.
And I think that's why the structures that came out of the Ethereum Foundation will help to actually create these future organizations. So part of our work is public good, of course, because we want to keep Ethereum healthy. But we also want Ethereum to take advantage of as many future opportunities as possible.
And this, in fact, is our goal. I think that's the lens through which we looked when we provided core funding to each of these three organizations. This is not yet resolved, David, because I think, to some extent, Bitmain didn't exist until a year and a half ago. So I think to some extent the crypto community and Ethereum are just trying to understand, like, how permanent is our capital?
Of course, since it is financed by common stock, it is essentially permanent. You see, there is no redemption here. We have no debts that would require us to return capital to any investor. So we are a source of permanent capital that has been around long enough to prove its durability, right? I mean, the things that would destroy Bitmain would theoretically destroy all of crypto, because we're, you know, in a crypto winter right now , and we have a lot of liquidity in our...In fact, our stocks have outperformed cryptocurrencies.
I mean, they outperformed Ethereum and Bitcoin this year. So investors believe we have much more longevity than the cryptocurrency itself. And I also think that Ethereum has become big enough that the foundation can't be the one-stop shop for everything. Imagine, for example, if the dairy industry had everything centralized through one group, or if the semiconductor industry association had just one group.
It became so big that a lot of specialization and specialized efforts emerged. So I think the same thing happened with Ethereum: the foundation is now allowing other players, the three you mentioned, to play an important role in Ethereum. But they will rely on other organizations to provide reliable funding.
And this is where Bitmain can step in, because we have a multi-year planning horizon. We don't have to worry about funding their budget just for next month. We can commit for three years or whatever term they need to scale. And I think that's a very important role because it has provided significant stability for Ethereum.
I think in 10 years, someone will say, "Here are all these amazing things that have happened because of crypto, tokenization, and AI, and blockchains—this is the only thing that saved us from the world being taken over by artificial intelligence, and, you know, tokenization has made people's lives much better because it has given them access to money in forms that did n't exist before." And our legacy will be that Ethereum is the main story in this narrative.
You know, this is our vision, because we really believe in crypto and the role it will play in tokenization and AI, and we've bet that Ethereum will be the platform where all of this will happen. So, in our opinion, I think our legacy is to help Ethereum remain the most important chain in this future.
I think, of course, this is a world of many chains. And that means we have hopefully delivered huge returns for our investors, namely Bitmain common stock holders. Because there is only beta to ETH. So, should ETH overtake Bitcoin? I think this is a very valid argument. So, you know, that's about 15,000 ETH.
So, roughly speaking, this is a tenfold increase for Bitmain shareholders from current levels. That is 180 per share. But shouldn't Bitcoin grow significantly, and doesn't the TAM of tokenization and AI mean that Ethereum's network cost should be much, much higher? I think so. Then, you know, what's the limit for ETH, if it's, let's say...you know, if it's 50,000, 100,000 or 200,000, I mean, the returns for our shareholders are going to be legendary.
And I think that's how we will be evaluated. Ethereum's ratio to Bitcoin has broken out of a decade-long downtrend, signaling a potential powerful surge driven by much stronger institutional narratives than in previous cycles, namely tokenization and agent-based AI. While a conservative retracement of 0.08 to the 2021 high, paired with a Bitcoin price of $150,000, would place Ethereum at around $6,000, Tom Lee suggests that this underestimates its potential given the scale of tokenization of real assets and AI-powered calculations.
The convergence of a number of catalysts, including potential regulatory certainty through the Clarity Act, capital flows from AI and cooled Asian equities, as well as institutional investors, are forcing Ethereum to chase higher quarterly performance. This makes ETH significantly undervalued relative to its central role at the intersection of Wall Street infrastructure, cryptoassets, and artificial intelligence.
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