BitMine Chairman Tom Lee appeared at Korea Blockchain Week, predicting the year-end target price for Ether: $10,000

Tom Lee, chairman of the US-listed company BitMine, recently served as the heavyweight guest at the Korea Blockchain Week, acting as the closing speaker at the main venue. BitMine took only 10 weeks to become the largest Ether DAT ( digital asset reserve company ), and Tom Lee also mentioned in the conversation why he chose Ether, whether stablecoin public chains are suppressing the narrative of “Ethereum's ChatGPT moment,” and predicted that the target price for Ether by the end of the year would be $10,000 to $12,000.

The Ethereum super cycle will be driven by fundamentals and AI.

Tom Lee stated that Ethereum is an undervalued chain. When BitMine launched its Ether asset reserve, the price of Ether was 1300, with the historical high even being set five years ago. BitMine identifies two major driving factors for the “super cycle”: its fundamentals and the future use cases combining AI and token economics. Tom Lee described that starting the Ethereum reserve from 1300 presents a huge risk-reward opportunity.

Although the price trend of coins in this cycle is not strong, the fundamentals of Ethereum are much stronger: the second largest blockchain, the largest smart contract platform, and a huge developer community. In his eyes, Ethereum is trying to make the world a better place, but outsiders feel that it is not stimulating enough.

In addition to “stablecoins are the ChatGPT moment of Ethereum”, the US government has become crypto-friendly, and Wall Street itself is embracing Blockchain. Most of the actual use cases will occur on Ethereum, where AI and tokenization scenarios will take place. For instance, AI agents and robots, Tom Lee believes will indeed create a demand for a “robot and token economy binding”. Trump just mentioned the need for “proof of humanity” (proof of human) to protect us, and many related works will also be completed on Ethereum.

Stablecoin public chain suppresses the narrative of “Ethereum's ChatGPT moment”?

When Stripe and Circle are both working on their own stablecoin public chains, Tom Lee was asked whether this would affect the fundamentals of Ethereum. He stated that stablecoins are tokenized dollars, and next, we will see tokenized stocks, credit, real estate, loyalty points, and intellectual property. Intellectual property is the largest component of U.S. capital expenditures (CapEx). Therefore, this will be a 400 trillion market, while stablecoins currently only total 280 billion, so he believes this market can allow many public chains to benefit.

(Tom Lee: BitMine has become a large-cap stock, ETH low-end indicators are emerging, and the year-end target is looking at ten thousand dollars)

The biggest difference between Ethereum and other public chains lies in its “neutrality”, with no single entity in control. Even a bank that is too big to fail has its own interests; when conflicts of interest arise, the outcomes will tend to favor the bank. Decentralization has been the direction Ethereum has worked towards for many years, and Tom Lee believes this characteristic will enable it to be truly adopted by the government and Wall Street.

Liquidity and attention have become the moat for MicroStrategy and BitMine.

As for the differentiated narrative of digital asset reserve companies, in terms of Bitcoin, Tom Lee believes that MicroStrategy will always have a premium. If one day a country really wants to buy 1 million Bitcoin, they will go to buy MicroStrategy, and that is their advantage.

On the Ethereum side, the differentiation of narratives has become even more distinct. This is because Ethereum has native staking rewards, can participate in DeFi, and can serve as a payment rail built on Ethereum. However, whether in the overall market or among institutions, everyone tends to only care about leading stocks, and BitMine ranks among the top in both stock trading volume and derivatives trading volume. The latter represents a hedging demand, indicating that many professional investors are focusing their attention on BitMine. Attention and liquidity are precisely the current advantages of BitMine.

Another advantage is that BitMine and Strategy have actually become large-cap stocks, and they will receive passive inflows of capital because, after rebalancing, they will become part of the major indices.

Will coin stock companies affect the decentralization of Ethereum? Tom Lee: Even if there is a 10% circulation, it is still very safe.

When discussing whether digital asset reserve companies could jeopardize the key narrative of Ethereum, “decentralization,” if a single entity holds too much and controls too much, there may come a day when diminishing returns appear. What is the critical value of this curve? Tom Lee stated that even if a single entity controls 10% of the circulation, it is still very safe. Taking BitMine as an example, the company is actually owned by 270,000 shareholders. The shareholders determine the stock performance, and if the stock price weakens, the company loses its fundraising ability. This model is actually relatively decentralized.

End of year Ethereum target price of $10,000? Venture capital founder: Tom Lee is a financial illiterate.

Tom Lee's price predictions often spark discussions. He predicts that Bitcoin could rise to $200,000 to $250,000 against the backdrop of the Fed turning dovish and the seasonal strength in the fourth quarter. He also believes that the relative valuation of ETH to BTC should return to recent range highs, thus giving a target price of about $10,000 to $12,000 for ETH by the end of the year. He emphasizes that $10,000 to $12,000 is merely for price discovery and not the ceiling for Ether.

The founder of the venture capital firm Mechanism Capital, Andrew Kang, sarcastically pointed out that Tom Lee's argument is fundamentally financially illiterate. He presented five major counterarguments using research data, including that the adoption of stablecoins and RWA will not bring the profits described by Tom Lee, and that the positioning of digital oil is not bullish at all.

In this article, BitMine Chairman Tom Lee appeared at the Korea Blockchain Week, predicting that the target price for Ether by the end of the year is $10,000. This was first reported by Chain News ABMedia.