Everything is going up except crypto. AI stocks are ripping, memory chips are ripping, even gold has had a run, and Bitcoin and Ethereum are stuck. I put that exact frustration to Tom Lee, the Fundstrat co-founder Wall Street actually listens to, on New Era Finance. His answer reframes the entire year: this isn’t a dying market, it’s what he calls “crypto spring,” and the price catching up to the fundamentals is the trade of the next few years.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Bitcoin and Ethereum combined are worth under 2 trillion dollars. Gold is 22 trillion, the stock market over 100 trillion, real estate around 300 trillion. Lee's case: to digitize any of that, you need Ethereum. |
| 2Ethereum fell from almost 5,000 dollars to 1,800 in six months with, in Lee's words, nothing fundamental actually changing. He calls this a retest, not a breakdown. |
| 3He rates the odds that AI agents will carry wallets and transact autonomously within 3 years at "pretty close to 100 percent," and argues blockchain is the only infrastructure that can host it without one company controlling it all. |
| 4My read: Lee talks his own book as BitMine's chairman, and says so implicitly through every answer. But the AI-agent argument is the most concrete case I have heard for why Ethereum specifically, not crypto generally, wins the next cycle. |
Welcome to “crypto spring”
I opened with the question every reader here has been asking for months: why is crypto the one asset class not participating in this rally? Lee’s answer surprised me, because he did not dispute the premise. He agreed the setup should have worked in crypto’s favor.
“If you asked me a year ago if AI stocks were going to go up a lot, software was going to rise, and there was going to be a war, I would have said those three things should have been good for crypto. But software’s done well, and crypto’s done badly. And in wartime situations we should expect to see gold and Bitcoin do well. Instead, crypto’s done really badly. And gold’s done pretty poorly too.”
Tom Lee, New Era Finance
His diagnosis has two parts. First, the market has not recovered from October 10th, the deleveraging event he says “wiped out a lot of people” and broke confidence that takes real time to rebuild. Second, money is chasing whatever is already moving rather than rotating on fundamentals: “Investors are buying whatever goes up because there’s not enough yield.” That is why AI stocks and memory chips get bid up while gold, the traditional safe haven, lagged too. Rational, in his view, just not evenly distributed.
His term for the resulting gap between fundamentals and price is the line I keep coming back to.
“To me this is more signs of crypto spring, because the fundamentals are actually much stronger and the growth ramps look much bigger, but the price is lagging. If you look at the past bear-market/" data-term-title="Bear Market" role="button" tabindex="0">bear market bottoms, it’s not a vertical recovery in price.”
Tom Lee
You can watch the full 34 minutes here:
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The 300 trillion dollar case for Ethereum
Lee’s Ethereum thesis starts with a comparison that sounds almost too simple until you sit with the numbers. Bitcoin is worth close to 2 trillion dollars, Ethereum a bit over 200 billion, so the two largest crypto networks combined sit under 2 trillion. Gold is 22 trillion. The stock market is over 100 trillion. Real estate is roughly 300 trillion.
“All of those other assets, to make them composable and monetize and digitize, you’re going to have to run it on Ethereum and other blockchains. And if Ethereum is at 300 billion, it’s grossly undervalued. Should Ethereum be a trillion, or two, or five trillion dollar network value? Yeah, I can easily see it in the next few years.”
Tom Lee
Why Ethereum specifically, and not one of the newer, faster chains? Lee gave three reasons, and the strongest one is not the technical performance argument you would expect from a market strategist. It is trust. “In the future people are going to really value neutrality and decentralization, because they don’t want a blockchain that has seven nodes, or it’s only in one country, or there’s two entities that own 30 percent of it.” Add eleven years of uptime, a genuine Lindy effect, and what he calls a maturity no competing chain has reached, and you get his summary case: most trusted, most secure, most compliant, “100 percent uptime.”
He was careful to separate Ethereum’s price from Ethereum’s foundation. The narrative that the Ethereum Foundation lost the plot, he argues, is backwards: it is “correctly shrinking its role” and streamlining, which confused holders short-term but does not make the network less valuable. The real reason ETH has underperformed even against Bitcoin, in his view, is that its two big narratives, AI infrastructure and tokenization, are running a little further out than people hoped.
AI agents will carry wallets, and blockchain is the only option
This is where the conversation stopped being generic bull-market talk and turned into something concrete. I asked Lee to map the next three years of AI onto crypto. He did not hedge.
“We’re going to delegate authority to agents to be economic agents for us. They’ll interact with websites, carry wallets, and make payments. That’s guaranteed, because today they can already interact with travel sites and use your account. I’d say the probability of all three of those happening in the next three years is pretty close to 100 percent.”
Tom Lee
The three things he means are agents transacting as economic actors, autonomous robots and cars taking on real-world work, and eventually machine-to-machine commerce at scale. His sharpest point is about who gets to run that infrastructure. Handing millions of transacting robots and agents to a single company is a trust problem waiting to happen. “You can’t rely on Amazon to control that robot. Amazon essentially is controlling a whole population of workers. You need a democracy of these agents.” His conclusion doubles as the cleanest one-line pitch for the entire asset class I have heard this year: “Everybody but the monopolist would want a decentralized solution.”
The tokenization leg of the thesis he treats as already decided, just not yet arrived. “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.” His proof point: “Tether makes more money as a stablecoin issuer than every bank in the world except for ten.” If moving money on-chain is already that profitable for one company, the rest of Wall Street noticing is a matter of when, not if.
Why “land,” not “the house,” is the right model for Ethereum
I pushed Lee on the mechanism: if trillions of dollars in real-world assets move on-chain, how exactly does Ethereum capture that value? Token-burn and fee-based models are the popular crypto answer, and he dismissed that framing almost immediately, drawing on three and a half decades of watching equities.
“That doesn’t explain what makes most stocks go up. For the last 20 years the Korean stock market had some of the best earnings and margins, and it’s been a crappy stock market. Apple hasn’t really had earnings growth, but the stock’s gone up a lot. In my 35 years, that’s not how stocks are valued.”
Tom Lee
His actual answer is an analogy about real estate, and it is the best explanation of Ethereum’s long-term value capture I have come across. He cited an MIT study of Dutch canal-house addresses that stayed constant for 700 years, long enough to isolate what actually appreciates. It was never the building.
“The only thing that goes up is land. When you buy a house and it goes up, it’s not because the house got more valuable, it’s because the land got more valuable. Land is not productive. It doesn’t pay you anything. It doesn’t have burn fees. In fact, you pay taxes on it. If everything happens on Ethereum, that’s land. So the land is the only thing that should go up over time.”
Tom Lee
The applications, the tokens, the protocols built on top, those are the houses: replaceable, competitive, prone to depreciation. Ethereum itself is the ground everything else sits on. That distinction is why he is not worried about which specific dApp or Layer 2 wins. He is betting on the land underneath all of them.
The Nvidia lesson for impatient investors
Six months ago Ethereum traded near 5,000 dollars. When we recorded this in June it was at 1,800. I asked Lee directly how he holds conviction through a drawdown that steep. His answer leaned on 35 years of watching markets misprice patience.
“I’ve never seen equilibrium in price. Prices are either cheap relative to what you think, or expensive relative to what you think, and it can happen for a long time. Six months ago Ethereum was almost 5,000. Now it’s 1,800. Has anything really changed? Not really.”
Tom Lee
His go-to example is Nvidia, and it is a genuinely useful gut-check for anyone staring at a red portfolio right now. “Last year when it was stuck at 160, even early this year at 160, we had a lot of clients saying this Nvidia’s done, it’s just so big it can’t go up. And then it goes to 240 at 15 times earnings, adding a couple trillion dollars of market cap in three months. The impatient are the ones that actually lose.” He applies the identical logic to memory chip stocks, which nobody wanted for three years until, in his words, “basically seven months ago,” and then went straight up. His advice: “This is like preparing for a hurricane. Do you wait to put in storm protection when the storm hits you? Or do you have it in place so when it happens, you’re already prepared? You should stay invested.”
2027: “the best returns of our lifetime”
Lee’s boldest call landed almost as a throwaway line, and it deserves more attention than it got in the room. He expects 2027 to be the year corporate profit margins expand dramatically because of AI, flipping the current narrative that AI spending is squeezing earnings.
“At my company, Fundstrat, we use a lot of AI and bots, and we’re growing without having to hire people. If your biggest cost is people, and you can grow your top line, that’s margin expansion. AI, if it’s productive, is disinflationary, so central banks should be easing. Dovish central banks and profits on a real basis going up. It could be the biggest stock market gains in our lifetime.”
Tom Lee
On the timing question everyone in this altcoin-season debate keeps asking, whether the four-year cycle still bottoms in October, Lee did not fight the framework outright, but he separated the calendar bet from the conviction that actually matters. Getting the exact month right is a bonus. Being positioned before the move starts is the job. That is consistent with everything else he told me: less about calling the bottom, more about not being the impatient investor who sells the land right before it starts appreciating again.
Full disclosure worth stating plainly: Lee is chairman of BitMine, one of the largest corporate holders of Ethereum, so every answer here comes from someone with real skin in this specific outcome. That does not make the reasoning wrong, but you should weigh it the way you would weigh Michael Saylor talking about Bitcoin or Arthur Hayes talking about his own trades, both guests on this podcast in the past two weeks. The pattern across all three: the loudest bulls are also the most exposed, and that is worth remembering exactly as you read their strongest lines.
This is the third New Era Finance conversation I have published on Cryptofocus in two weeks, after Michael Saylor and Arthur Hayes. If that is the caliber of guest you want every week, do yourself a favor: subscribe on YouTube, or listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts. Follow me on X via @CryptoMichNL for daily updates. See you at the next episode. Ciao!
