Tom Lee củng cố niềm tin: Mùa xuân tiền mã hóa đã đến, ETH sẽ tăng lên 250.000 đô la

Original article from Tom Lee

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

Tom Lee, a new generation of die-hard ETH bulls, is here again to restore everyone's faith.

On June 2, Beijing time, Tom Lee, Chairman of the Board of BitMine (NYSE: BMNR), the publicly traded 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, Lee argued that the current bearish sentiment marks a market bottom for Bitcoin and Ethereum. He stated that as AI and tokenization drive major transformations 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 ETH holdings currently show 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, representing about 4.47% of the circulating supply. In contrast, the Ethereum Foundation has been selling for years and now holds only 100,000 ETH, a negligible 0.1% of the total supply. He believes corporate validators will replace the shrinking Ethereum Foundation as the network's key stewards.

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

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Good afternoon, everyone. I have a 30-minute presentation prepared, with a lot to cover because there's so much 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 there's a lot of anger in the crypto space. Many people think the main character in the market next will be AI. I believe these are all typical signs of a market bottom. In fact, I have a few slides here to explain why Agentic AI is a major pillar of the crypto narrative that will unfold this year.

So, I'll break this talk into three parts:

• Part one is macro-level explanation, giving five reasons why I firmly believe the crypto spring has arrived. Even if you don't believe in many of the products being built in blockchain and crypto, five major tailwinds will come into play this year.
• Part two 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 they should play in this new system.
• Part three is about how, if you want exposure, rather than buying the underlying token, you should buy crypto treasury stocks (primarily BitMine).

1. Has the Crypto Spring Arrived?

Why do I think the 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, stuck 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 poised 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 approaching its end.

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

Oil is a fundamental driver of inflation. If oil triggers inflation issues, it means central banks globally must tighten policy: oil prices rise, supply of petroleum products is severely impacted, and policymakers have to raise interest rates. So once the war ends, the fear premium in oil will disappear. Oil prices could drop to $40 per barrel.

Ethereum currently has a high negative correlation with oil prices. In fact, it's 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 statistically.

If you don't believe me about inflation and oil prices, look at this chart. It goes back to 1985. The top line shows oil price changes, and the bottom line 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 arrive. 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%, appropriate tightening would be suitable. Central banks don't want inflation above 2%, and if oil prices stay high, they will remain hawkish.

So, our bet is that the war is coming to an end.

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

Unfortunately, the market assigns only a 56% probability of the bill being signed this year. 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 believe the real 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. There are many voters who 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 crypto, which is also very favorable for dollar policy, especially regarding stablecoins.

Fourth, we have a new Fed Chair, Kevin Warsh, who is pro-Bitcoin.

Finally, there are massive tailwinds for the stock market. I know many of you might be bearish on stocks because they've rallied so much. But at Fundstrat (Odaily note: The independent research firm founded by Tom Lee), we have been structurally bullish on the stock market.

This next chart relates to the US population aged 30-50. Every time this number rises, the US economy grows faster than its trend rate. Due to Millennials, Gen Z, and Gen Alpha, we are seeing this super-trend growth. As the chart shows, if you overlay stock returns with the 30-50 age population, the stock market has always moved parabolically higher.

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

These are all favorable factors for crypto. Of course, you might still wonder 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: Agentic AI and Robotics.

The chart below is a list of 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 gain the ability to interact with and operate websites. The third major advancement was in robotics – progress in the dexterous operation of Optimus Prime. And of course, there's 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 unveiled a robot capable of actually building and operating at scale in a warehouse. This means that in the future, robots will dominate most of the traffic on the internet.

This is why people 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 at governing robot behavior. For example, whether it's authentication, identity verification, 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, and they are still going up. Then last year it was storage stocks, which underwent a revaluation. But as you can see, the market is now starting to see AI's benefits for large-cap tech stocks, and the impact is transmitting to the software sector. People thought software would be hurt by AI, but this small parabolic rise shows – software companies are benefiting from AI because they are developing the infrastructure for the future, and the future AI infrastructure will be built on crypto.

So, to me, 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 historically moved in sync.

Now we see divergence. Software stocks have gone parabolic. I believe 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 the future of money is computing power. In fact, many tech founders already see this. Part of the reason is that we have seen the future.

Today, the transaction volume of stablecoins has already surpassed that of Visa. In the future, people believe 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 the current tokenization market size is very small. If the market size reaches $300 trillion, how will that 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 value of assets reaches $300 trillion, the Total Value Locked (TVL) on the Ethereum network won't just stay at $100 billion or $200 billion.

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

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

So, with one-thousandth of the employees, they are achieving nearly the same profitability as JP Morgan. This also shows that merely transferring money is more valuable than safekeeping money.

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

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

This leads to my third point: These smart contract platforms are very likely to become the unit of value for monetization. Because holding ETH for transactions could be said to be easier than holding dollars.

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, noting that there are many favorable factors driving ETH accumulation, just like Amazon back in the day – Amazon's stock was stuck at $6, and today it has increased over 1,000 times.

So, one metric worth watching in this regard is the ETH/BTC ratio.

If our view is correct, ETH will break out as tokenization and AI develop. And I think it's about a 50x increase, representing 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 about it this year. He said the Ethereum Foundation will streamline its role; it will not be the sole centralized management body for everything Ethereum.

This makes sense because the Ethereum Foundation's share isn't what it used to be. It once held 17% of the supply. By 2020, this figure dropped to 1%. Last year, when BitMine started its treasury operations, it dropped to 0.3%. Today, the Ethereum Foundation only holds 100,000 ETH, or 0.1% of the supply.

Following the typical foundation model – a 5% return rate – they could only support about $10 million in grants. But this is exactly where treasuries come into play. The Ethereum treasuries I refer to include BitMine, Sharplink, etc. – they now hold 7% of the ETH supply.

If you are an accountant, you know what treasury stock is. Treasury stock is essentially supply permanently removed from the ecosystem. We also have yield now – about a 3% return. So today, these public treasuries generate $500 million in rewards annually, which is 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, the Foundation played an important role. They funded public goods, provided a lot of legal and operational infrastructure. Of course, they also coordinated the ecosystem, maintained neutrality, and tried to drive adoption. These were indeed crucial 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, 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 representing the ecosystem.

But they want to enhance decentralization. Why is this extremely necessary? An entity with a network value of $240 billion, running for 11 years, never having a day of downtime. It has 1,500 nodes distributed across 89 different countries, and 15,000 developers.

I think this is too big