Still, the company has faced challenges. After its stock exploded in the wake of Lee joining the firm, it has since dropped significantly amid concerns that holding a large amount of crypto makes its stock highly sensitive to fluctuations in the digital-asset market.
After BitMine’s stock soared in July, it tumbled and was recently down 70% from its peak. The stock is still up about 400% in 2025.
Nonetheless, Lee sees more upside potential in ether compared with bitcoin and believes ether could outperform bitcoin over the next few years.
“Ethereum is different from bitcoin because it’s a smart-contract platform, which allows programmable transactions and can store a lot of information,” Lee said. In contrast, bitcoin, like gold (GC00), is more of a pure, inert store of value, he noted.
Currently, bitcoin’s market capitalization stands at roughly $2.1 trillion, over five times larger than ether’s $417 billion market value, according to CoinMarketCap.
Ether, according to Lee and other advocates, functions as a dynamic digital ecosystem powering smart contracts, decentralized finance, tokenized assets and digital-identity infrastructure. Among its many applications, stablecoins – digital tokens pegged to assets like the U.S. dollar DXY – have emerged as the first major use case to achieve widespread adoption. Most stablecoin activity happens on the Ethereum blockchain.
See: Many crypto-treasury companies are trading for less than what their digital assets are worth. Is this a bargain or a big red flag?
But that’s only the beginning, Lee added. Stablecoins are just one example of tokenized assets – representations of real-world assets on the blockchain. “Now, Wall Street is exploring how to tokenize stocks, bonds and even real estate,” he said, bringing traditional financial assets into the same programmable ecosystem.
“Ethereum is now the new base layer for this tokenized future,” Lee said. “It is now undervalued, and that means there’s going to be a lot more value in products being built on Ethereum, and so it can outperform bitcoin over the next few years.”
-Isabel Wang
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