Back in 2017, Tom Lee was one of the few formally dressed men on CNBC who dared to publicly be optimistic about Bitcoin.
Not the kind of talk like 'Bitcoin is a tulip craze,' nor the saying that 'blockchain is important, not Bitcoin.' He suggested institutional investors treat Bitcoin as digital gold—buying it before the world reacted. At the time, this sounded more like a college debate in a fog than a mature strategy. Fundstrat
Even lost some clients because of it.
You know, at that time, Bitcoin was only trading around $1,000, and most people still regarded it as a speculative toy, or even a den of criminals. Of course, Lee's views later became more and more fragrant like aged wine...
And now, Lee is back.
But this time, he's no longer preaching Bitcoin—but Ethereum. Moreover, he is now the chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies...
The company bought 833,000 ETH in its first month of operation—close to the entire network's
1%.
Their goal?
Eventually accumulate 5% of the total Ethereum supply. At current market prices, that's about $20 billion.
Lee said: "Our actions are 12 times faster than MicroStrategy's when it came to Bitcoin. Ethereum's treasury is not just an ETF, it's infrastructure."
Next, we'll break down what he means by this...and why Lee's thinking may turn Wall Street's skepticism about cryptocurrencies into genuine belief.
Why Lee is optimistic about Ethereum
Of course, Lee still believes Bitcoin will rise to over $1 million in the future.
But in his eyes, Bitcoin is digital gold... and Ethereum is the process of on-chaining the entire banking system—it is Wall Street's legal and compliant blockchain infrastructure.
Look at all the important crypto industry headlines recently:
Circle's IPO
Coinbase's 'Super App' strategy
JPMorgan Chase's access to Coinbase
Robinhood pushes tokenized assets
Stablecoin legislation...
These are all built on top of Ethereum.
MicroStrategy caused a sensation by using one trick: buying Bitcoin and holding Bitcoin. But Lee believes that the ETH treasury strategy offers tools that go far beyond these:
🔹 Native Yield
Ethereum staking earns about 3% annualized rewards. If you hold $3 billion worth of ETH, these staking rewards are income that can be booked without selling the principal.
🔹 Scarcity
If Bitmine locks up 5% of the entire network's
of ETH, this means that the circulating supply on the market is reduced by 5%.
🔹 Accumulation Speed
This refers to the rate at which each unit share can increase ETH. MicroStrategy adds about 16 cents of Bitcoin value per share per day, for four years. Bitmine is increasing ETH at a rate of up to $1 per share per day.
In theory, this faster stacking speed means higher valuation multiple potential.
🔹 Liquidity
Bitmine trades $1.6 billion a day—about the same as Uber, but it has a market cap of only $4 billion.
Such liquidity means lower and faster financing costs.
🔹 Demand-Side Integration
Owning ETH and becoming a validator means you directly access Ethereum's settlement and security layer.
You can also earn fees from other services (such as oracles, sequencers, custody services, etc.).
It's like not only owning a toll road, but also operating the gas stations, rest areas, and billboards along the way -
The same traffic flow, getting more ways to monetize.
In short, when you stack native yield, scarcity, accumulation speed, liquidity, and demand-side integration, you have a value-driving mechanism that far surpasses traditional ETFs. The recent $15,000–$20,000 shockwave
In Lee's view, Ethereum today is like Bitcoin in 2017—misunderstood, undervalued, and about to be repriced. He believes:
$4,000 is the floor—just returning to last December's high;
$6,000 is Ethereum's 'fair valuation' relative to Bitcoin;
$7,000 to $15,000 is the realistic range for the next 12-18 months—provided Wall Street wakes up.
He judges this because:
Ethereum is the infrastructure layer for Wall Street, artificial intelligence, asset tokenization, and even future sovereign blockchain reserves.
If his judgment is correct:
Then Bitmine's operating logic—scarcity, profitability, accumulation speed—will become a new paradigm template for Wall Street to re-evaluate crypto assets.
A massive revaluation is coming
This has happened before. Wall Street always misses every new era until a 'rule breaker' comes along and redraws the entire map.
In the late 1990s, analysts, for the sake of 'stability', valued Amazon as a traditional retail company—it was called 'overvalued' at a price of $6 at the time. But Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley proposed a completely new framework: treat Amazon as an internet platform with network effects, not just an online bookstore. She was right. Her report released in 1998 completely reversed Wall Street's perception.
In 2013, Wall Street made the same mistake again—they regarded Tesla as a niche car company and ignored the trillions of dollars of energy transition logic behind it.
Cathie Wood of Ark Invest insists that Tesla should be seen as a technology and energy company, not just a car manufacturer—a view that was ultimately proven correct. Even gold is the same. After the United States left the gold standard, it took decades to be re-understood from 'industrial metal' to a monetary asset. In the 1970s, 'Mr. Gold' Jim Sinclair popularized the idea that 'gold is a monetary safe-haven asset'.
Now, it's Ethereum's turn.
Most people on Wall Street are still trying to value it with a 'quarterly cash flow model' or treat it as a commodity that can only be priced based on transaction fees.
Tom Lee believes this is completely misunderstood. He said: Ethereum's value comes not only from transaction revenue,
More importantly, it is a 'strategic infrastructure' that is scarce, profitable, and being built on by Wall Street itself.
Once institutions realize this—Lee says, the intensity of this revaluation will be no less than those major cognitive turning points in history.
Big shift
In Tom Lee's proposed Ethereum treasury model, the crypto narrative is completely reversed.
No longer: "What's the hot narrative today?"
Instead, it becomes: "How much of the network's productive capacity do you control? How much revenue can it generate? How quickly are you expanding that share? How liquid is your position?"
This is actually how Wall Street views pipelines, power grids, and telecommunications companies—
These assets have three things in common:
Scarcity
Sustainable earning capacity
High replication cost
In such a world:
ETH is the settlement layer
Solana may be a high-speed railway
DePIN projects are the physical infrastructure that connects terminals
Even those governance tokens that have long been criticized will be revalued as long as they control truly cash-flowing infrastructure.
Of course, the meme era will not disappear—after all, we are talking about the 'Internet world'.
But for more and more people:
Tokens will no longer be like 'Disney tokens' (pure entertainment), but will be seen as the 'monetization layer' in the digital infrastructure of the 21st century.