Author| Tom Lee
Compiled| WuBlockchain
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 elaborating his long-term bullish views on the crypto market. Key points include: why the main theme for 2025 is 'tokenization,' why he believes Bitcoin and Ethereum prices have bottomed, 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 wave of crypto financialization. He also explained BitMine's strategy, the business logic behind the Ethereum treasury model, and the next stage of financial innovation brought by the combination of prediction markets and tokenization.
This content represents the personal views of the guest and does not represent the views of WuBlockchain. Audio transcription was done by GPT and may contain errors. Please listen to the full podcast on Xiaoyuzhou, YouTube, etc.
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Below is the content of Tom Lee's speech:
Speech Opening
Tom Lee:Hello everyone. It's great to connect with you at this moment. As you know, since October, the crypto market has been through a tough period, with pessimism rising. I know many people are ready to give up. Therefore, I反而 believe now is a very appropriate time to discuss the crypto market and why I am so bullish on Ethereum.
So, the title 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 of Fundstrat Capital, which manages three ETFs, including Granny Shots—the fastest actively managed stock ETF to reach $3 billion in scale; third, I am the Chairman of the Board of BitMine Immersion Technologies, and BitMine is currently the institution holding the most Ethereum globally. If you want to follow us on social media, Fundstrat's handle is "@fundstrat," and BitMine's is "@bitMNR."
In the next about 25 minutes, I will cover several parts. First, why we are still very bullish on the crypto market—the core lies in tokenization. Second, why I believe crypto asset prices have bottomed, and why within the next eight weeks, we might truly break Bitcoin's traditional four-year 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, representing 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 of these companies will likely outperform holding crypto assets directly in the future.
Wall Street Stays Engaged: Tokenization Reshapes the Financial System
Okay, the core theme for 2025 is tokenization. But before展开, let's look back over the past decade. In December 2016, if you bought the S&P 500 index, your money would have grown three times, 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 have been 65 times. But if you bought Bitcoin ten years ago—around the time we first recommended Bitcoin to Fundstrat clients—your money would have grown 112 times. Even more惊人 was Ethereum, with a return rate of nearly 500 times, even surpassing Bitcoin.
Now coming to 2025, although there have been many major fundamental positives this year, the market price action has been very poor. Here are a few key points. First, the U.S. government has clearly shifted to supporting crypto assets and set the tone for the entire Western world. Second, some U.S. state governments and the federal government have planned or executed strategic-level Bitcoin reserves—this is an extremely important event. Third, BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF has now become one of its top five fee-generating products—要知道 this product has only been out for a year and a half, which is very noteworthy. At the same time, JPMorgan—an institution that has long been critical of cryptocurrency—has also started issuing JPM Coin on Ethereum. They are not the only ones joining; tokenization has now become one of the top strategic directions for major financial institutions.
Additionally, there are several crypto-native products that have quietly changed the decision-making process of traditional finance. One is Polymarket, whose prediction market generates extremely high information value—at Fundstrat, we even call it "the closest thing to a crystal ball." Another example is Tether—although it is just a single-product crypto-native company, it has now become one of the top ten most profitable "banks" in the world.
But the real main theme for 2025 is tokenization. It all started with stablecoins, and that was Ethereum's "ChatGPT moment." Wall Street suddenly realized: just tokenizing the dollar can 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 bookkeeping." I'm not sure how "exciting" bookkeeping is, but clearly, this is a significant event. And the image of Brian Armstrong sharing the stage with Larry Fink on DealBook is also quite symbolic.
If you have turned bearish because of the performance of the past decade or believe the golden age of the crypto market is over, I disagree with this view. Now, only 4.4 million Bitcoin wallets have a balance exceeding $10,000; meanwhile, nearly 900 million people globally hold retirement accounts exceeding this amount. If Bitcoin's future holding penetration rate can approach the scale of retirement accounts, that would mean an adoption increase of 200 times—still exponential, even超高速 growth. And according to Bank of America's fund manager survey, 67% of fund managers still have no allocation to Bitcoin at all.
Wall Street wants to tokenize all assets—if you include real estate and various financial assets, the scale is close to $1 quadrillion. In an era dominated by intelligent agents, decentralized trust and security will become crucial—and this is the core value that blockchain can provide.
<极好的span data-font-family="微软雅黑">Therefore, for me, the best times for the crypto industry are still ahead.
Market Has 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 has risen nearly 20%, the crypto market has traded as if it were in deep winter; Bitcoin and Ethereum are still negative for the year. Arca's Jeff Dorman wrote a great article titled "The Selling That Nobody Can Explain." Many people have various theories about the crypto market decline, but none can truly explain this round of decline.
I want to emphasize that Bitcoin was performing strongly until October 10. But after that, many began trying to explain the subsequent decline:比如 potential risks from quantum computing, the traditional four-year cycle, the largest liquidation event in history on October 10, AI concept stocks sucking market attention, MicroStrategy hinting it might sell some Bitcoin, MSCI considering removing digital asset treasury companies from indices, Tether's rating being downgraded, etc. These factors may have had an impact, but the key is—the crypto market was still up 36% before October 10, after which it fell in a straight line. In my view, the core reason for this decline is mainly deleveraging.
After the FTX collapse, market makers took eight weeks to recover, and the price discovery process restarted. And 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: one at the market low in March 2020, and another during the panic sell-off in April due to tariff-related events. He currently only serves two clients, and we are one of them.
Tom DeMark advised us to significantly slow down our Ethereum buying pace. You can see from our internal data that our weekly ETH purchases were halved from previous levels, to 50,000 per week. But now we are actively buying again. Last week we bought nearly 100,000 ETH, double that of two weeks ago. And I'll give you a hint: we bought even more this week. The reason is simple, we believe Ethereum's price has 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 accurately刻画了 all major tops and bottoms. But why does Bitcoin exhibit such a cycle? Our digital asset team proposed five reasonable explanations: the halving cycle, monetary policy, leverage/margin debt structure, and two other factors—the copper-to-gold ratio and the ISM (Institute for Supply Management) index. The problem is, several of these variables no longer exhibit a four-year pattern.
For example, the copper-to-gold ratio used to show a predictable four-year cycle rhythm—and it highly correlated with Bitcoin's movements. But this time it's not the case; this ratio should have peaked this year, but no拐点 appeared. Similarly, the ISM index historically showed a clear four-year cycle, but recently it has stayed below 50 for three and a half years consecutively. When we align ISM with Bitcoin's movements, it even explains historical cycles better than Bitcoin halving... however, this round, ISM did not turn according to the cycle.
So my question is: if key variables like the industrial cycle and copper-to-gold ratio are no longer following the four-year rhythm, why would Bitcoin continue to follow? I don't think Bitcoin has peaked. And the real test will be next January—if Bitcoin hits a new high in January, then the four-year cycle is officially broken.
Ethereum as the Future Financial Core
Now let me explain why Ethereum is the core of future finance. This year, Ethereum is experiencing its own "1971 moment." In 1971, the U.S. dollar detached from the gold standard, and this shift forced Wall Street to create new financial products to ensure the dollar's continued status as the global reserve currency. In 2025, the same thing is happening in the tokenization world—the difference is, this time what is being重构 is not just the dollar, but all asset classes including stocks, bonds, and real estate, being recreated on smart contract platforms. And this platform is Ethereum.
Now, 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 also constantly upgrading—for example, the Fusaka upgrade completed today further enhances network capabilities. Even early Bitcoin developer Eric Voorhees recently said: "Ethereum has won the smart contract war."
As for the price level, 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 we transformed BitMine into an Ethereum treasury company—we saw this trend early. More importantly, we believe the ETH/BTC ratio is also about to experience a significant breakout. If 2025 is the year when tokenization truly explodes, then Ethereum's utility value will increase significantly.
What does this mean for prices? I think Bitcoin will rise to $250,000 in the coming months. If the ETH/BTC ratio returns to the average of the past eight years, Ethereum's price would reach $12,000; if it returns to the 2021 high, it would be $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 would correspond to 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 far greater than people imagine. Larry Fink believes we are at the beginning of "all assets beginning to be tokenized." The advantages of tokenization include: the ability to achieve fractional ownership of assets, lower costs, global trading 24/7, higher transparency, and potentially higher liquidity. But these are just the basics. The real transformation happens when tokenization combines with prediction markets.
When most people mention tokenization, they think of splitting a painting into multiple tradable shares. But in fact, you can also "deconstruct" a company into its elements. For example, you can decompose 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 particularly significant, this would be very meaningful. You can also tokenize product lines, tokenize revenue from different regions, tokenize subscription service revenue, and even separately tokenize Musk's own implied value in the market. All of this will provide Wall Street with new price discovery tools and risk management means.
BitMine is actively looking for projects building the next generation of tokenization systems.
DAT: Bridging 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 Proof-of-Stake, where staking not only provides network security but also brings yield—and this yield becomes revenue for the treasury company. Treasury companies act as a bridge between traditional finance (TradFi) and decentralized finance (DeFi), and stablecoin issuers will ultimately also want to stake ETH, as it will become the base monetary layer of the entire system.
But the most important metric for measuring whether a crypto treasury company truly has influence in the market is the trading liquidity of its stock. MicroStrategy is currently the 17th most traded stock in the U.S.—its trading volume even exceeds JPMorgan. BitMine, although only formed a few months ago, has already become the 39th most actively traded stock in the U.S.—its trading volume exceeds General Electric and almost catches up with Salesforce.
Among about 80 crypto treasury-related companies, MicroStrategy and BitMine account for 92% of all trading volume. MicroStrategy is financializing its balance sheet to create a "digital-credit vehicle," while BitMine focuses on connecting Wall Street, Ethereum, and the DeFi ecosystem.
BitMine has now become the institution holding the most Ethereum globally—this is quite remarkable, especially considering we had zero ETH five months ago. Our Maven staking solution, when fully deployed, is expected to bring a staking yield of about 2.9% on our holdings—meaning approximately $400 million in annual revenue, averaging about $1.3 million per day. More importantly, this is all done on a completely clean balance sheet: over $12 billion in Ethereum, a small amount of Bitcoin, a series of high-risk, high-return moonshot investments, and about $900 million in cash.
Our strategy covers multiple directions—including moonshot investments, such as "Proof-of-Human" projects represented by Worldcoin as an ERC-20 token; staking infrastructure construction; deep cooperation with the Ethereum Foundation; investments in the DeFi领域; and the formation 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 user-facing brand with high recognition, supported by a large community and our own R&D investment. Our roadmap includes: the construction of the Maven validator network, large-scale community investment, moonshot-level R&D projects, with the ultimate goal of capturing at least 5% of the Ethereum network share in the future.
My speech ends here. Thank you all.
