Tom Lee Sees $10,000 Ethereum Price Target After Launching Bitmine Treasury Play originally appeared on TheStreet.
Tom Lee, the well-known macro strategist and founder of Fundstrat, is now placing a big bet on Ethereum.
As the newly appointed chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies, Lee has helped launch what he calls a fundamentally different kind of crypto treasury company to emulate Michael Saylor’s success with the simple twist of stacking Ethereum. It’s off to a hot start, with shares rising close to 1,000% since the Monday announcement.
“Ethereum, you know, is attractive, in my opinion, [because] it is the Layer-1 blockchain where real world assets are becoming tokenized,” Lee explained during an interview with Coinage. With the explosive growth of stablecoins and a surge in tokenization efforts from firms like Robinhood and Coinbase, Lee says the opportunity to front-run traditional finance is real. “We’re essentially getting in front of what other businesses will do.”
Bitmine’s goal is replicate what Strategy has been able to, but there are more than a few differences between a Bitcoin treasury company and an Ethereum treasury company.
“There’s a bit of an advantage of an Ethereum treasury company if you directly compared it to a Bitcoin treasury,” Lee said. “One is that there is a yield you can earn on Ethereum by staking. … The second is that Ethereum’s delivered volatility… is actually twice that of Bitcoin. So… it actually makes it cheaper to fund purchases.” Staking yield. Higher volatility. And — perhaps most crucially — a more active use case in the world of financial infrastructure. For Lee, those are the building blocks of a strong thesis.
“Ethereum might have actually languished and lacked innovation for some period of time,” he acknowledged. But today, “the fact that there’s now tokenization taking place of real financial assets… I think that there is going to be a real look back at the Layer-1 networks that offer a lot of utility.” When asked directly where this leads, Lee didn’t mince words.
“Ethereum probably could go to $10,000 or something,” he said, calculating a valuation based on companies like Circle, which recently went public in one of the most successful IPOs in recent memory. “Circle trades at around 100-times EBITDA … and a lot of Circle operates off Ethereum. So… if these tokenized assets like tokenized dollars traded 100-times EBITDA, what should the blockchain be valued at?”
To Lee, Ethereum may be deeply undervalued — and the emergence of treasury companies like Bitmine could spark a reflexive cycle. The dual nature of ether, both a capital market asset and a digital token akin to “digital oil,” makes Ethereum unique. And it’s why Lee sees the potential for a long-overdue breakout.
