Tom Lee boosts confidence: Crypto spring has arrived, ETH could rise to $250,000

Original article from Tom Lee

Compiled by Odaily Planet Daily - Qin Xiaofeng (@QinXiaofeng 888 )

A new-generation die-hard ETH bull, Tom Lee, is back to top up everyone's conviction.

On June 2nd, Beijing time, Tom Lee, Chairman of the Board of BitMine (NYSE: BMNR), the publicly listed company with the largest Ethereum treasury, attended the "Proof of Talk 2026" conference at the Louvre in Paris and delivered a speech titled "Crypto Spring: ETH is the Future of Money".

In his speech, Tom Lee argued that the current bearish sentiment marks a market bottom for both Bitcoin and Ethereum. He stated that as AI and tokenization drive major changes in financial infrastructure, ETH could eventually reach $250,000. (Odaily Note: On the day of Tom Lee's speech, BTC fell below $66,000, and ETH dropped to a low of $1,820. Bitmine's current ETH holdings are showing an unrealized loss of approximately $8.86 billion.)

Furthermore, he mentioned that Bitmine recently purchased 111,942 ETH, increasing its holdings to nearly 5.4 million ETH, about 4.47% of the circulating supply. In contrast, the Ethereum Foundation has been selling off for years and now holds only 100,000 ETH, a negligible 0.1% of the total supply. He believes that corporate validators will replace the shrinking Ethereum Foundation as the network's key stewards.

The following is the full text of Tom Lee's speech (with some abridgments), compiled by Odaily Planet Daily. Enjoy~

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Good afternoon everyone, I have a 30-minute speech prepared, with a lot to cover because there are many topics worth discussing.

I believe we have entered a crypto spring. Many of you might have lost faith in crypto because prices haven't gone up. Your friends might be exiting, and the crypto space is filled with anger. Many think the market's next focus is AI. I believe these are all signs of a cyclical bottom. In fact, I have a few slides here to explain why Agentic AI is a major pillar of the crypto narrative, a trend that will unfold this year.

So, I will divide this sharing into three parts:

• The first part is a macro explanation, five reasons why I firmly believe crypto spring has arrived. Even if you don't believe in the many products being built in blockchain and crypto, there are five tailwinds that will come into play this year;
• The second part is to explain to you why Ethereum is likely the best example of the future of money. I will talk about the foundation and the role it should play in this new system;
• The third part is, if you want to gain exposure, instead of buying the underlying tokens, buying crypto treasury stocks (primarily Bitmine) is better.

1. Crypto Spring Has Arrived?

Why do I think crypto spring has arrived?

Take a look at this price chart of Ethereum below. You can see it has been consolidating for nearly five years, trapped in this range, waiting for a decisive breakout. If you are bearish, you might think it will break downwards. I will explain why I believe it is headed for a bullish breakout.

(Odaily: This chart is outdated; ETH has now fallen to the $1,800~$1,900 range)

The first catalyst is: The Iran war is about to end.

I know many people think crypto prices have nothing to do with the Iran war. But actually, the Iran war has caused problems for oil prices and supply.

Oil is a fundamental driver of inflation. If oil causes inflation issues, it means global central banks must tighten policy: oil prices rise, supply of petroleum products is severely impacted, and policymakers are forced to hike interest rates. So once the war ends, the panic premium on oil will disappear. Oil prices could drop to $40 a barrel.

Ethereum currently has a high negative correlation with oil prices. In fact, this is the highest negative correlation in Ethereum's history. So it's clear that rising oil prices are bearish for the ETH price. We can see this from the statistical data.

If you don't believe me about inflation and oil prices, look at the chart below. This chart starts from 1985. The top part shows the change in oil prices, and the bottom part shows core CPI. As we can see, every time oil prices spike persistently, core CPI accelerates higher.

Therefore, if this is a prolonged conflict, inflation will follow. In fact, last month the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) said the same thing in its meeting minutes: if inflation persists and remains above 2%, then appropriate policy tightening would be fitting. Central banks don't want inflation above 2%, and if oil prices stay high, they will maintain a hawkish stance.

Therefore, we are betting that the war is about to end.

The second positive macro catalyst is the Clarity Act, which provides a legal framework for the popularization of crypto in the United States and the participation of financial institutions.

Unfortunately, the market believes the probability of the act being signed into law this year is only 56%. I've spoken with many people in Washington, including our own policy experts. The actual probability seems much higher. Prediction markets are trying to find an equilibrium, but I think the actual probability is far above 56%.

Of course, I know big banks don't want this to happen. But remember, policy isn't made by big banks; laws serve the people. Many voters want to see the Clarity Act passed. If it passes, it will be a massive catalyst.

The third positive catalyst is the government. Don't forget, the White House is pro-Bitcoin and pro-crypto, which is also very favorable for dollar policy, especially regarding stablecoins.

Fourth, we have a new Federal Reserve Chair, Kevin Warsh, and Kevin Warsh is pro-Bitcoin.

Finally, the stock market also faces huge positive factors. I know many of you might be bearish on stocks because they've risen too much. But at Fundstrat (Odaily Note: The independent research firm founded by Tom Lee), we have been structurally bullish on the stock market.

The chart below relates to the US population aged 30-50. Every time this number rises, the US economy grows faster than its trend rate. Due to the Millennials, Gen Z, and Generation Alpha, we are seeing this super-trend growth. As shown in the chart, if you overlay stock returns with the population aged 30-50, the stock market always moves up parabolically.

This tells us that by the end of this decade, the S&P 500 could reach 15,000 to 18,000 points.

These are all favorable factors for crypto. Of course, you might still be wondering why crypto is so weak. I think it's because people have forgotten that crypto is the future of money.

2. The Future of Money

The first point I want to talk about is: Agentic AI and Robotics.

The chart below is a list of all milestones since the launch of ChatGPT in 2023, marking significant progress over the past three years.

The first milestone was the launch of ChatGPT; the second occurred in 2024, when agentic systems began to have the ability to interact with and operate websites; the third major advance was robotics—the progress of Optimus Prime in dexterous manipulation. And of course, Ukraine manufacturing drones on an industrial scale.

Finally, we are seeing the development of superhuman capabilities. OpenAI solved an 80-year-old problem. Figure AI launched a robot capable of actual construction and large-scale operation in a warehouse. This means that in the future, robots will dominate most traffic on the internet.

This is why figures like Marc Andreessen call this trend "the great unification." Because if you have robotic systems, you need to control them. And blockchain is far more effective than traditional systems for controlling robot behavior. For example, whether it's identity verification, identification, or payment speed, all of these work better on crypto systems.

You might ask, why isn't this reflected in crypto prices yet? Because the stock market is still gradually transmitting the impact.

The first group to truly benefit from the AI ecosystem were semiconductor companies, which are still rising. Then last year came the memory stocks, which are undergoing revaluation. But as you can see, the market is now starting to see the benefits of AI for big tech stocks and is transmitting to the software sector. People thought software would be harmed by AI, but this small parabolic rise shows—software companies are benefiting from AI because they are developing for the future AI infrastructure, and the future AI infrastructure will be built on crypto.

So in my view, this is completely logical; we are just progressing step by step. I think it will only take a few months. If you think it's impossible, look at the relationship between Ethereum and software stocks; they have been fluctuating in sync for a long time.

Now we see divergence; software stocks have risen parabolically. I think in a few more weeks, the price of Ethereum will reflect this.

The second key point is Tokenization. Wall Street today wants tokenization, and they also believe that the future of money is computing power. In fact, many tech founders have already seen this. Part of the reason is that we have already glimpsed the future.

Today, the transaction volume of stablecoins has surpassed that of Visa. In the future, it is believed that the tokenized securities market could be as large as $300 trillion. This would include tokenization of real estate, fixed income, equities, derivatives, land, and gold.

You can see that the tokenization market today is very small. If the market reaches $300 trillion, how will it bring more value to or benefit crypto assets? Remember, the price of crypto assets is highly correlated with the amount of tokenized assets. Therefore, if the market asset value reaches $300 trillion, the total value locked on the Ethereum network won't stay at $100 billion or $200 billion.

This is the reality: there are currently only a handful of blockchains that can operate at scale. What does this mean? I believe that crypto technology, which can provide immense efficiency, will replace many of today's most profitable banks.

Let me give you a few examples. JP Morgan is the most profitable bank in the world, with annual revenue of $60 billion. But there is a company called Jane Street, which essentially only does money transfer business, and this year they will make $40 billion. That's almost as much as JP Morgan, but with only 3,000 employees.

Therefore, with a thousandth of the employees, they are achieving a profit level comparable to JP Morgan. This also shows that just moving money is more valuable than safekeeping money.

Crypto technology is very good at moving money. Take Tether for example. Tether might make $15 billion this year. It's a crypto-native company with only 300 employees; together with Jane Street, they make more money than JP Morgan.

Investors always tend to support the incumbents, and they always overvalue them. But as you can see, it's the new entrants who end up capturing all the value. Therefore, I believe that in the next 10 years, five of the world's top ten financial institutions will be crypto-native companies.

This brings me to my third point: these smart contract platforms are very likely to become the unit of value for monetization. Because using ETH for transactions might be easier than using the US dollar.

Elon Musk said that in the future, we won't use the dollar as currency; it's just a measure of energy. Standard Chartered Bank released a report on Ethereum this week. They compared Ethereum to Amazon, pointing out that many favorable factors are driving ETH accumulation, just like Amazon back then—Amazon's stock price was stuck at $6, and today Amazon's stock has risen over a thousand times.

So, a key metric to watch in this regard is the ETH/BTC exchange rate.

If our view is correct, then with the development of tokenization and AI, ETH will break out. And I think it's about a 50x increase, which is a considerable upside for Ethereum.

Finally, I want to talk about the Ethereum Foundation. Because in this new world, the foundation should no longer be the central node of the cryptocurrency. Vitalik wrote an article about this earlier this year. He said the Ethereum Foundation will streamline its role; it won't be the sole central management body for everything on Ethereum.

This makes sense because the Ethereum Foundation's holdings are no longer what they used to be. It once held 17% of the supply; by 2020, that number dropped to 1%; last year, when Bitmine started its treasury business, it dropped to 0.3%; today, the Ethereum Foundation only holds 100,000 ETH, 0.1% of the supply.

If we follow the typical foundation model—a 5% return rate—they can only support about $10 million in grant projects. But this is exactly where treasuries come in. By Ethereum treasuries, I mean Bitmine, Sharplink, etc.—which now hold 7% of the ETH supply.

If you are an accountant, you know what treasury stock is. Treasury stock is basically supply permanently withdrawn from the ecosystem. We also now have yield—about a 3% yield. So now these public treasuries generate $500 million in rewards annually, which is exactly the capital we can use to fund the crypto ecosystem. By the way, Bitmine accounts for 4.5% of the total ETH supply and 65% of all ETH treasury holdings.

In summary, before 2024, before we had a friendly White House, foundations played an important role by funding public goods and providing much of the legal and operational infrastructure. Of course, they also coordinate the ecosystem, maintain neutrality, and try to drive adoption. These are indeed very important functions. It made sense in the DeFi world.

But being in 2026, in this new world, the role of the foundation has evolved.

First, they still want to manage long-term research: things like quantum resistance, privacy, and how to keep this blockchain relevant. They want to coordinate private sector efforts. They want to set standards and best practices. I believe they will play a public role in representing the ecosystem.

But they want to enhance decentralization. Why is this highly necessary? An entity with a network value of $240 billion, running for 11 years without a single day of downtime. It has 1,500 nodes spread