Who is Tom Lee? From Wall Street internet celebrity to creator of Ethereum 'MicroStrategy'
He is one of the few on Wall Street who dares to make firm predictions amid the alternating bull and bear markets, and he is also one of the earliest strategists to incorporate Bitcoin into the traditional financial valuation system. Today, he stands again at the forefront of the Ethereum narrative, leading a new round of structural transformation of 'Ethereum financial companies'.
Tom Lee was born into a Korean immigrant family in Westland, Michigan, USA, as the third child in the family. His father is a psychiatrist, while his mother transitioned from being a housewife to a Subway chain restaurant operator. Lee received a good education from a young age and eventually entered the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting.
The First Stage of Wall Street: Representative of the Mainstream Investment Banking 'Golden Generation'
Lee's Wall Street career began in the 1990s, where he worked at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. In 1999, he joined JPMorgan Chase and became the firm's Chief U.S. Equity Strategist in 2007. During his tenure, he frequently made headlines in financial media due to his independent logical framework and optimistic market expectations, and he also became embroiled in controversy for publicly criticizing industry shortcomings.
Independent Departure, Embracing Crypto: He is the First Wall Street Strategist to Value BTC
In 2014, Lee co-founded Fundstrat Global Advisors, officially 'departing' from the investment banking system to create his own research framework. He was among the first group of Wall Street figures to seriously study Bitcoin's value.
In 2017, he released a landmark research report titled 'A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold', which modeled BTC as 'digital gold' for the first time.
This model viewed BTC as a partial substitute for gold as a store of value, predicting its theoretical valuation center for 2022 to be $20,300, with a fluctuation range between $12,000 and $55,000. Subsequently, Lee proposed a network value model based on Metcalfe's Law, which could explain over 94% of BTC's historical price fluctuations.
He pointed out: 'When the crypto market breaks through a $500 billion market cap, it is no longer a niche asset but an allocation object that cannot be ignored by central banks and sovereign wealth funds.'