Translation | Wu Shuo Blockchain
At the 2025 Binance Blockchain Week held in Dubai on December 3–4, Fundstrat co-founder and BitMine Chairman Tom Lee delivered a speech titled "The Crypto Supercycle Remains Intact," systematically outlining his long-term bullish view on the crypto market. The core points include: why the main theme of 2025 is "tokenization," why he believes bitcoin and ethereum prices have bottomed out, how the traditional four-year cycle is being broken, ethereum's role as infrastructure in the global financial system, and how Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies will play a key role in the next round of crypto financialization. He also explained BitMine's strategy, the business logic of the ethereum treasury model, and the next stage of financial innovation brought by the combination of prediction markets and tokenization.
Below is Tom Lee's speech:
Opening Remarks
Tom Lee: Hello, everyone. I’m delighted to speak with you at this moment. As you all know, since October, the crypto market has gone through a tough period, with pessimism rising. I know quite a few people who are ready to give up. Therefore, I actually think now is a very appropriate time to discuss the crypto market and why I am so bullish on ethereum.
So, the topic of today’s speech is "The Crypto Supercycle Remains Intact." Let me briefly introduce my background. I currently hold three positions: First, I am the Head of Research at Fundstrat Global, an institution focused on macro and crypto research; second, I am the Chief Investment Officer at Fundstrat Capital, which manages three ETFs, including Granny Shots — the fastest actively managed equity ETF in history to reach 3 billions USD in scale; third, I am the Chairman of the Board at BitMine Immersion Technologies, which is currently the institution holding the largest amount of ethereum globally.
Over the next 25 minutes or so, I will cover several sections. First, why we remain very bullish on the crypto market — the core is tokenization. Second, why I believe crypto asset prices have bottomed out, and why in the next eight weeks, we may truly break the traditional four-year bitcoin cycle; this time, I don’t think the market will continue to follow the 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 currently understand — for Wall Street, it is a huge structural unlock. Fifth, why digital asset treasury companies — such as MicroStrategy or BitMine — will play a central role in this process. In fact, holding the stocks of these companies may outperform directly holding crypto assets themselves in the future.
Wall Street Stays Involved: Tokenization Reshapes the Financial System
Okay, the core theme of 2025 is tokenization. But before we dive in, let’s review the past decade. In December 2016, if you bought the S&P 500, your funds would have tripled — a pretty good performance. If you were a gold advocate and bought gold, you would have gained four times. And if you were smart enough to buy Nvidia, your return would be 65 times. But if you bought bitcoin ten years ago — when we first recommended it to Fundstrat clients — your funds would have grown 112 times. Even more impressive is ethereum, with a return of nearly 500 times, surpassing bitcoin.
Now, coming to 2025, despite a large number of major positive fundamentals this year, market price performance has been very poor. Here are a few key points. First, the US government has clearly shifted to support crypto assets and set the tone for the entire Western world. Second, some US state and federal governments have planned or implemented strategic-level bitcoin reserves — this is an extremely important event. Third, BlackRock’s bitcoin ETF has become one of its top five fee income products — and this product has only been out for a year and a half, which is very noteworthy. Meanwhile, JPMorgan — an institution long critical of crypto — has also started issuing JPM Coin on ethereum. They are not the only ones joining; now, tokenization has become one of the top strategic directions for major financial institutions.
In addition, several crypto-native products have quietly changed the way traditional finance makes decisions. One of them is Polymarket, whose prediction market generates extremely valuable information — at Fundstrat, we even call it "the closest thing to a crystal ball." Another example is Tether — although it is a crypto-native company with only a single product, it has now become one of the world’s ten most profitable "banks."
But the real main line of 2025 is tokenization. It all started with stablecoins, which is ethereum’s "ChatGPT moment." Wall Street suddenly realized: simply tokenizing the US dollar can generate huge revenue. Now, financial institutions generally believe tokenization will reshape the entire financial system.
Larry Fink even called it "the most exciting financial innovation since the invention of double-entry bookkeeping." I’m not sure how "exciting" bookkeeping really is, but clearly, this is a significant matter. And on DealBook, the scene of Brian Armstrong and Larry Fink appearing together is quite symbolic.
If you’ve turned bearish because of the past decade’s performance, or think the golden age of the crypto market is over, I disagree. Right now, only 4.4 million bitcoin wallets have a balance over $10,000; meanwhile, nearly 900 million people worldwide have retirement accounts exceeding this amount. If the future penetration rate of bitcoin holdings approaches the scale of retirement accounts, that would mean a 200-fold increase in adoption — still exponential, even hyper-growth. And according to Bank of America’s fund manager survey, 67% of fund managers still have zero allocation to bitcoin.
Wall Street wants to tokenize all assets — if you include real estate and all types of financial assets, the scale is close to 10 trillions USD. In an era dominated by intelligent agents, decentralized trust and security will become crucial — and this is the core value that blockchain can provide.
Therefore, for me, the best era of the crypto industry is still ahead.
Has the Market Bottomed? Witnessing the Break of the Four-Year Cycle
Let me explain why I believe crypto asset prices have bottomed. Although gold has returned 61% year-to-date and the S&P index is up nearly 20%, crypto market trading performance feels like a deep winter; bitcoin and ethereum are still negative for the year. Jeff Dorman from Arca wrote a great article titled "The Selling That Nobody Can Explain." Many people have various theories about the crypto market’s decline, but none truly explain this round of selling.
I want to emphasize that bitcoin performed strongly before October 10. But after that, many people tried to explain the subsequent decline: such as potential risks from quantum computing, the traditional four-year cycle, the largest liquidation event in history on October 10, AI concept stocks drawing market attention, MicroStrategy hinting at possibly selling some bitcoin, MSCI considering removing digital asset treasury companies from indices, Tether’s rating being downgraded, and so on. All these factors may have an impact, but the key is — the crypto market was still up 36% before October 10, but then fell straight down. In my view, the core reason for this decline is mainly deleveraging.
After the FTX collapse, it took market makers eight weeks to recover, and the price discovery process only then restarted. Now, it’s been about seven and a half weeks since a similar liquidity shock this round. About five weeks ago, we started working with Tom DeMark on bitcoin — he is a legendary market timing analyst. I have used his indicators at two key bottoms: once at the market low in March 2020, and once in April during the panic sell-off caused by tariff-related events. He currently serves only two clients, and we are one of them.
Tom DeMark advised us to significantly slow down our ethereum buying. You can see from our internal data that our weekly ETH purchases were halved from previous levels, down to 50,000 per week. But now we have started buying aggressively again. Last week, we bought nearly 100,000 ETH, double that of two weeks ago. And here’s another hint: this week we bought even more. The reason is simple — we believe ethereum prices have bottomed. We are very bullish on its future trend.
Now let’s talk about bitcoin’s four-year price cycle — historically, this four-year cycle (more precisely 3.91 years) has almost exactly marked all major tops and bottoms. But why does bitcoin show such a cycle? Our digital asset team has proposed five reasonable explanations: halving cycles, monetary policy, leverage/margin debt structure, and two other factors — the copper-to-gold ratio and ISM (US business activity index). The problem is, several of these variables no longer follow a four-year pattern.
For example, in the past, the copper-to-gold ratio usually showed a predictable four-year cycle rhythm — and matched bitcoin’s trend closely. But not this time; the ratio should have peaked this year, but there was no turning point. Similarly, the ISM index historically showed a clear four-year cycle, but recently it has stayed below 50 for three and a half years. When we align ISM with bitcoin’s trend, it even explains historical cycles better than bitcoin halving... but this round, ISM did not turn as per the cycle.
So my question is: if key variables like the industrial cycle and copper-to-gold ratio no longer follow a four-year rhythm, why should bitcoin continue to do so? I don’t think bitcoin has topped out. The real verification point will come in January next year — if bitcoin hits a new high in January, then the four-year cycle will be officially broken.
Ethereum as the Core of Future Finance
Now let me explain why ethereum is the core of future finance. This year, ethereum is experiencing its own "1971 moment." In 1971, the US dollar left the gold standard, and this turning point 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, this time, not just the dollar, but all asset classes including stocks, bonds, and real estate are being recreated on smart contract platforms. And that platform is ethereum.
Today, every major financial institution is building blockchain-based products, and the vast majority of real-world asset (RWA) tokenization is happening on ethereum. Ethereum itself is constantly upgrading — for example, today’s Fusaka upgrade further improved network capacity. 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 now is showing signs of breaking out. This is one of the reasons we transformed BitMine into an ethereum treasury company — we saw this trend in advance. More importantly, we believe the ETH/BTC ratio is also about to see a major breakout. If 2025 is truly the year tokenization explodes, ethereum’s utility value will increase significantly.
What does this mean for price? I believe bitcoin will rise to $250,000 in the coming months. If the ETH/BTC ratio returns to the average level of the past eight years, ethereum will reach $12,000; if it returns to the 2021 high, that’s $22,000. And if ethereum truly takes on the role of global financial infrastructure — which we firmly believe will happen — and the ETH/BTC ratio rises to 0.25, then ethereum’s price will be about $62,000. At the current price of around $3,000, ethereum is clearly severely undervalued.
The Long-Term Value of Tokenization
In the last few minutes, let’s talk about why the unlock brought by tokenization is much bigger than people imagine. Larry Fink believes we are at the starting point of "all assets beginning to be tokenized." The advantages of tokenization include: enabling fractional ownership of assets, lower costs, 24/7 global trading, higher transparency, and potentially higher liquidity. But these are just the basics. The real transformation happens when tokenization is combined with prediction markets.
Most people, when they mention tokenization, only think of splitting a painting into multiple tradable shares. But in fact, you can also "factorize" a company. For example, you can break down Tesla’s different revenue streams and tokenize them separately; you can even tokenize the present value of Tesla’s 2036 earnings — if you think Musk’s compensation plan will make that year especially critical, this makes a lot of sense. You can also tokenize product lines, tokenize revenue from different regions, tokenize subscription service income, and even separately tokenize Musk’s implied value in the market. All of this will provide Wall Street with brand new price discovery tools and risk management methods.
BitMine is actively seeking projects to build the next generation of tokenization systems.
DAT: Connecting Traditional Finance and DeFi
Finally, let’s talk about Digital Asset Treasuries (DAT). A true ethereum treasury company is essentially a crypto infrastructure company. Ethereum uses a proof-of-stake mechanism, where staking not only provides security for the network but also generates yield — and this yield becomes the treasury company’s revenue source. Treasury companies act as a bridge between traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), and stablecoin issuers will ultimately 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 treasury company truly has market influence is the trading liquidity of its stock. MicroStrategy is currently the 17th most traded stock in the US — its trading volume even surpasses JPMorgan. BitMine, although only established a few months ago, has already become the 39th most actively traded stock in the US — its trading volume exceeds General Electric and is almost catching up with Salesforce.
Among about 80 crypto treasury-related companies, MicroStrategy and BitMine account for 92% of all trading volume. MicroStrategy is building a "digital-credit vehicle" by financializing its balance sheet, while BitMine focuses on connecting Wall Street, ethereum, and the DeFi ecosystem.
BitMine has now become the institution holding the largest amount of ethereum globally — this is quite remarkable, especially considering that five months ago we didn’t have a single ETH. Our Maven staking solution, once fully deployed, is expected to bring about a 2.9% staking yield to our holdings — which means about $400 million in annual revenue, or an average of $1.3 million per day. More importantly, all of this is done on a completely clean balance sheet: over $12 billions 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 Worldcoin, an ERC-20 token representing "Proof-of-Human" projects; staking infrastructure construction; deep cooperation with the Ethereum Foundation; investments in the DeFi sector; and the establishment of BitMine Labs. Relying on BitMine’s stock trading volume advantage 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 highly recognized, user-facing brand, supported by a large community and our own technology R&D investment. Our roadmap includes: building the Maven validator network, large-scale community engagement, moonshot-level R&D projects, and the ultimate goal of capturing at least 5% of the ethereum network share in the future.
That concludes my speech. Thank you all.
