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Author:Tom Lee,Compile:Wu talks about blockchain
At the 2025 Binance Blockchain Week held in Dubai from December 3 to 4, Tom Lee, co-founder of Fundstrat and chairman of BitMine, delivered a speech titled “The Crypto Super Cycle Is Still Solid”, systematically expounding his long-term bullish views on the crypto market. The core includes:Why the main thread of 2025 is “tokenization”, why it is believed that the prices of Bitcoin and Ethereum have bottomed out, the traditional four-year cycle is being broken, Ethereum will play an infrastructure role in the global financial system, and Digital Asset Treasury (DAT, Digital Asset Treasury) companies will assume a key position in the next round of crypto financialization.He also explains BitMine’s strategy, the business logic of the Ethereum treasury model, and the next phase of financial innovation brought about by the combination of prediction markets and tokenization.
The following is the content of Tom Lee’s speech:
Speech opening
Tom Lee: Hello everyone.It’s my pleasure to communicate with you at this moment.As you all know, the crypto market has been going through a rough patch since October with rising pessimism.I know quite a few people who are ready to give up.So, I instead think now is a very appropriate time to discuss the crypto market and why I am so bullish on Ethereum.
Therefore, the title of today’s speech is “The Crypto Super Cycle Remains Solid.”Let me start by giving you a brief introduction to my background.I currently hold three positions: first, I am the Director of Research at Fundstrat Global, which specializes in macro and crypto research; second, I am the Chief Investment Officer of Fundstrat Capital, which manages three ETFs, including Granny Shots, the fastest active equity ETF in history to reach $3 billion; and third, I am Chairman of the Board of Directors at BitMine Immersion Technologies, which currently holds the largest amount of Ethereum in the world.If you want to follow us on social media, Fundstrat is “@fundstrat” and BitMine is “@bitMNR”.
Over the next 25 minutes or so I’m going to circle around a few parts.First, why we are still very bullish on the crypto market – the core lies in tokenization.Second, why I believe cryptoassets have bottomed out in price, and why in the next eight weeks we may actually break out of Bitcoin’s traditional four-year cycle, this time I don’t think the market will continue to follow a four-year cycle.Third, Ethereum is the foundation of the future financial system, which is important because Ethereum will be at the core of the tokenization wave.Fourth, the value brought by tokenization is far more profound than most people understand now, and it is a huge structural unlock for Wall Street.Fifth, why digital asset treasury companies – such as MicroStrategy or BitMine – will play a central role in this process.In fact, holding shares in these companies will likely outperform holding the crypto assets themselves directly in the future.
Wall Street Stays Engaged: Tokenization Reshapes the Financial System
Okay, so the core theme of 2025 is tokenization.But before we get into that, let’s look back at the past decade.In December 2016, if you had bought the S&P 500, your money would have tripled, which is pretty good.If you are a gold fan, buy gold and you will get four times the profit.And if you were smart enough to buy Nvidia, you would have made 65x your profit.But if you had bought Bitcoin a decade ago—the period when we first recommended it to Fundstrat clients—your money would have grown 112x.Even more impressive is Ethereum, which has a return of nearly 500 times, even surpassing Bitcoin.
Now coming to 2025, and despite a ton of major fundamental upside this year, market price action has been very poor.Here are a few key points.First, the U.S. government has made a clear shift in favor of cryptoassets and has set the tone for the entire Western world.Second, some U.S. state governments, as well as the federal government, have planned or implemented strategic-level Bitcoin reserves—an extremely important event.Third, BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF has now become one of its top five fee-earning products – which is very noteworthy considering that this product has only been launched for a year and a half.Meanwhile, JP Morgan—an institution that has long been critical of cryptocurrencies—also began issuing JPM Coin on Ethereum.They are not the only ones joining in. Tokenization has now become one of the top strategic directions for major financial institutions.
In addition, there are several crypto-native products that have quietly changed the way traditional finance makes decisions.One of them is Polymarket, whose prediction market generates information that is extremely valuable—at Fundstrat, we even call it “the closest thing to a crystal ball there is.”Another example is Tether – despite being a crypto-native business with a single product, it is now one of the ten most profitable “banks” in the world.
But the real thread in 2025 is tokenization.It all started with stablecoins, and that was Ethereum’s “ChatGPT moment.”Wall Street suddenly realized: Just tokenizing the dollar could generate huge revenue.Now, financial institutions generally believe that tokenization will reshape the entire financial system.
Larry Fink even called it “the most exciting financial innovation since the invention of double-entry accounting.”I’m not sure how “exciting” this whole accounting thing is, but apparently, it’s a big deal.On DealBook, the scene where Brian Armstrong and Larry Fink appeared on the same stage can also be said to be quite symbolic.
If you’re turning bearish because of the performance of the past decade, or think the crypto market’s prime days are over, I disagree.Today, only 4.4 million Bitcoin wallets hold more than $10,000 in balances; at the same time, nearly 900 million people around the world hold more than that amount in retirement accounts.If Bitcoin’s future holding penetration can approach the size of retirement accounts, that would mean a 200-fold increase in adoption—still exponential, even hyper-fast growth.According to a survey of fund managers by Bank of America, 67% of fund managers still have no allocation to Bitcoin at all.
Wall Street wants to tokenize everything — nearly $1 trillion if you include real estate and various financial assets.In an era dominated by intelligent agents, decentralized trust and security will become crucial – and this is the core value that blockchain can provide.
So, to me, the best days of the crypto industry are still ahead of us.
Has the market bottomed?Witness breaking the four-year cycle
Let me explain why I believe crypto asset prices have bottomed.While gold has returned 61% year-to-date and the S&P is up nearly 20%, crypto markets are trading like they’re in the depths of winter; Bitcoin and Ethereum are still in negative territory so far this year.Jeff Dorman of Arca wrote a great article titled The Selling That Nobody Can Explain.Many people have various theories about the crypto market decline, but none of them can really explain this decline.
I want to highlight that Bitcoin was performing strongly until October 10th.But after that, many people began to try to explain the ensuing decline: such as the potential risks brought by quantum computing, the traditional four-year cycle, the largest liquidation event in history that occurred on October 10, AI concept stocks sucked away market attention, MicroStrategy hinted that it might sell part of Bitcoin, MSCI considered excluding the Digital Asset Treasury Corporation from the index, Tether’s rating was downgraded, and so on.These factors could all have an impact, but here’s the kicker – the crypto market was still up 36% until October 10th, and has since plummeted.In my opinion, the core reason for this round of decline is mainly deleveraging.
After the FTX crash, it took eight weeks for market makers to recover and for the price discovery process to restart.It has now been about seven and a half weeks since this round of similar liquidity shocks.About five weeks ago, we started working with Tom DeMark on Bitcoin – he is a legendary market timing analyst.I have used his indicator at two key bottoms: the market low in March 2020 and the panic selling in April due to tariff-related events.He currently only serves two clients, and we are one of them.
Tom DeMark suggests we significantly slow down our Ethereum buying efforts.You can see from our internal data that our weekly ETH purchases have halved from previous levels to 50,000 per week.But now we are back to buying aggressively.Last week we purchased close to 100,000 ETH, double what we purchased two weeks ago.And I’ll give you another hint: We’re buying more this week.The reason is simple, we believe that Ethereum price has bottomed.We are very bullish on its future trends.
Now let’s talk about Bitcoin’s four-year price cycle – historically, this four-year cycle (3.91 years to be more precise) has almost accurately mapped all major tops and bottoms.But why does Bitcoin show such a cycle?Our digital assets team proposed five plausible explanations: the halving cycle, monetary policy, leverage/margin debt structure, and two additional factors – the copper-to-gold ratio and the ISM (US Business Activity Index).The problem is that several of these variables no longer exhibit four-year patterns.
For example, the copper-to-gold ratio has typically followed a predictable four-year cycle in the past—and has closely matched Bitcoin’s movements.But this is not the case this time. This ratio should have peaked this year, but there has been no turning point.Likewise, the ISM index has historically shown a clear four-year cycle, but has recently stayed below 50 for three and a half years.When we align the ISM with Bitcoin’s movements, it explains the historical cycles even better than the Bitcoin halving… This time around, however, the ISM is not turning cyclically.
So my question is: If key variables such as the industrial cycle and the copper-gold ratio no longer follow the four-year rhythm, why does Bitcoin continue to follow it?I don’t think Bitcoin has peaked.The real verification point will occur in January next year – if Bitcoin reaches a new high in January, then the four-year cycle will be officially broken.
Ethereum as the financial core of the future
Now let me explain why Ethereum is at the heart of the future of finance.This year, Ethereum is experiencing its own “1971 moment.”In 1971, the U.S. dollar came off the gold standard, a transition that forced Wall Street to create new financial products to ensure the dollar’s continued status as the global reserve currency.By 2025, the same thing is happening in the tokenized world—the difference is that this time, it’s not just the U.S. dollar, but all asset classes, including stocks, bonds, and real estate, are being re-created on smart contract platforms.And this platform is Ethereum.
Today, every major financial institution is building blockchain-based products, and the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) is overwhelmingly happening on Ethereum.Ethereum itself is constantly being upgraded – such as the Fusaka upgrade just completed today, which further improves the network’s capabilities.Even early Bitcoin developer Eric Voorhees recently said: “Ethereum has won the smart contract war.”
As for price, Ethereum has been range-bound for the past five years, but is now starting to show signs of a breakout.This is one of the reasons why we transformed BitMine into an Ethereum treasury company – we saw this coming early.More importantly, we believe that the ETH/BTC ratio is also about to experience an important breakthrough.If 2025 is the year that tokenization truly explodes, Ethereum’s utility value will increase significantly.
What does this mean for price?I think Bitcoin will rise to $250,000 in the next few months.If the ETH/BTC ratio returns to its average of the past eight years, Ethereum price will reach $12,000; if it returns to the 2021 highs, it will be $22,000.And if Ethereum truly takes on the role of global financial infrastructure – which is what we firmly believe will happen – and the ETH/BTC ratio rises to 0.25, then the price of Ethereum will correspond to about $62,000.At its current price of around $3,000, Ethereum is clearly significantly undervalued.
The long-term value of tokenization
In the last few minutes, let’s talk about why tokenization unlocks so much more than people think.Larry Fink believes we are at the beginning of “all assets starting to be tokenized.”The advantages of tokenization include the ability to achieve fragmented holding of assets, lower costs, 24/7 global trading, greater transparency, and potentially higher liquidity.But these are just the basics.The real revolution happens when tokenization is combined with prediction markets.
When most people think of tokenization, they only think of splitting a painting into multiple tradable shares.But in fact, you can also “dismantle” a company into its elements.For example, you could break out Tesla’s different revenue streams and tokenize them separately; you could even tokenize the present value of Tesla’s earnings in 2036 — which makes a lot of sense if you think Musk’s compensation plan will make that year particularly critical.You can also tokenize product lines, tokenize revenue from different regions, tokenize subscription service revenue, and even tokenize Musk’s own implicit value in the market separately.All this will provide Wall Street with new price discovery tools and risk management methods.
BitMine is actively looking for projects to build the next generation of tokenization systems.
DAT: Connecting traditional finance and DeFi
Finally, let’s talk about Digital Asset Treasurys.Ethereum Treasury Corporation, in its true sense, is essentially a crypto infrastructure company.Ethereum uses a Proof-of-Stake mechanism, and staking not only provides security for the network, but also brings revenue – and this revenue will become a source of revenue for the treasury company.Treasury Corporation serves as a bridge between traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), and stablecoin issuers will eventually want to stake ETH as it will become the base currency layer of the entire system.
But the most important metric to measure whether a crypto vault company is truly influential in the market is the trading liquidity of its shares.MicroStrategy is now the 17th-most traded stock in the U.S.—its volume exceeds even that of JPMorgan Chase.Although it was founded only a few months ago, BitMine has become the 39th most actively traded stock in the United States — surpassing General Electric in terms of volume and nearly catching up with Salesforce.
Of the roughly 80 crypto-treasury-related companies, MicroStrategy and BitMine accounted for 92% of all trading volume.MicroStrategy is building a “digital-credit vehicle” by financializing its balance sheet, while BitMine is focused on connecting Wall Street, Ethereum and the DeFi ecosystem.
BitMine is now the largest holder of Ethereum in the world – which is quite impressive, especially considering that just five months ago we didn’t own any ETH.Our Maven staking solution, when fully deployed, is expected to generate a staking yield of approximately 2.9% on our holdings – representing approximately $400 million in annual revenue, averaging approximately $1.3 million per day.What’s more, it’s all done on a completely clean balance sheet: more than $12 billion in Ethereum, a small amount of Bitcoin, a series of high-risk, high-reward moonshot investments, and about $900 million in cash.
Our strategy covers multiple directions – including moonshot investments, such as the “Proof-of-Human” project represented by Worldcoin as an ERC-20 token; staking infrastructure construction; in-depth cooperation with the Ethereum Foundation; investment in the DeFi field; and the formation of BitMine Labs.Relying on BitMine’s stock trading volume advantages and strong links with Wall Street, we believe we can truly build a bridge between traditional finance and the crypto world.
BitMine is also growing into a user-oriented brand with a high degree of recognition. This is backed by both the support of the huge community and our investment in independent technology research and development.Our roadmap includes: the construction of the Maven validator network, large-scale community investment, and moonshot-level R&D projects. The ultimate goal is to obtain at least 5% of the Ethereum network share in the future.
This concludes my speech.Thank you all.
