Tom Lee Miami Speech: If Bitcoin is above $76k by the end of May, it signals the end of the bear market

Compilation | Wu Talks Blockchain

This is Tom Lee’s live speech at Consensus Miami 2026. He first believes that the crypto bear market has ended, and says that if Bitcoin’s closing price at the end of May is above $76,000 and there is a streak of gains for three consecutive months, it will clearly mark the end of the bear market. He adds that since the outbreak of the U.S.-Iran war, cryptocurrencies have been the best-performing assets.

When it comes to asset allocation, Tom Lee believes that over a ten-year cycle, cryptocurrencies provide substantial diversification value. A decade ago, allocating just 1% of funds to Ethereum could double the total investment portfolio. At the same time, Ethereum can provide the same downside-hedging protection as gold with only a 1% exposure.

As for the driving forces behind the next bull market, he thinks agentic AI and tokenization will be the core themes. According to Grayscale’s prediction, tokenization will become a $300 trillion market, and the crypto networks that carry a large amount of tokenization activity will capture the corresponding economic value. He expects that in the future, half of large financial institutions will be digital-native, and that DeFi and crypto-native enterprises—because they use blockchain for settlement—eliminate a large number of intermediaries and staff, resulting in per-capita profit performance far exceeding that of traditional financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase.

Finally, he introduces Bitmine’s positioning as a digital asset treasury and its business progress. Currently, Bitmine holds more than 4% of the Ethereum supply, with an Ethereum staking scale of $14 billion, generating annualized staking income of over $300 million. In addition, the company has invested in an AI company that holds shares in OpenAI and holds the token WLD from the World (formerly Worldcoin) project. At the same time, Bitmine has also bet on creator MrBeast, who is laying out a Z-generation financial platform.

The guest’s remarks do not represent Wu Talks’ views and do not constitute any investment advice. Please strictly follow local laws and regulations. Audio transcription and translation are completed by GPT, and may contain errors.

Crypto market outlook: Crypto winter ends if Bitcoin rises for three consecutive months

Tom Lee: First, the crypto winter has ended; spring has arrived, which means a bull market is starting. Most people often do not notice when the early signs of a bull market appear. I want to explain to you why you should increase risk exposure now rather than rushing to sell. The second point is about the driving forces of the next bull market. Although the underlying logic is very straightforward, I still need to emphasize here: why will agentic AI and tokenization enable the profitability of crypto-native entities to surpass that of traditional banks? The third point naturally is to talk about Bitmine—why we have already made full preparations for the next cycle.

I know there is a layer of wartime fog over the current market—America is in conflict with Iran—but this really should not affect how we judge assets that are truly scarce and are actually working. The facts support this as well, because Bitcoin has already been rising for three consecutive months. As long as Bitcoin’s closing price at the end of May holds above $76,000, it will achieve three consecutive months of gains. Why is this important? Because if Bitcoin closes higher for three consecutive months, we cannot still be in a bear market.

Since Bitcoin was born, “two consecutive months of gains” has indeed occurred during bear markets (for example in 2022), but “three consecutive months of gains” has never occurred during a bear market. So, in my view, as long as Bitcoin’s closing price this month is above $76,000, it means the bear market has completely ended.

Another point is that software stocks have bottomed out. As you know, software stocks have maintained a high correlation with Bitcoin all along. In fact, on May 1, our Fundstrat team already included software stocks among our preferred sectors. So, besides the Mag 7 (the seven tech giants), semiconductors, and cryptocurrencies, we at Fundstrat strongly recommend software stocks as top investment picks. Also, since the outbreak of the war, cryptocurrencies have actually been the best-performing asset class. You can see that since the Iran war started, Ethereum has been among the best performers.

At present, the overall trend has turned positive. In fact, John Bollinger also said yesterday that his trend model has turned positive, and he is now fully invested in Bitcoin. After experiencing the last crypto winter, many people may feel mentally and physically exhausted, even thinking about giving up on cryptocurrencies. But remember, cryptocurrencies have always been an excellent diversification tool. We can look back 10 years: suppose at that time your investment in Ethereum was zero, and you only bought the S&P 500 with $100,000 in principal—your money would now become $229,000. That is what the data shown in the first row of the table indicates.

But if, 10 years ago, you allocated 1% of your total assets to Ethereum, the total value of your investment portfolio would reach $520,000. That is to say, just increasing your Ethereum exposure by 1% could double your total assets. By the way, if you had allocated 5% to Ethereum back then (see the third row of the data), your portfolio would now be worth $1.7 million—an astonishing 8x return.

Therefore, when you extend the horizon to a ten-year cycle, cryptocurrencies are absolutely a powerful diversification tool. They are also an excellent hedging instrument. We can think about it from another angle: how much other assets would you need to hold in order to withstand the losses caused by a 50% drop in the S&P 500? If it’s Ethereum, you only need 0.4% exposure to completely hedge the disastrous loss from a stock-market crash. If you want to achieve the same effect using gold, you would need to allocate as much as 37% of funds to gold. This shows that Ethereum provides equivalent-strength hedging protection with only a very small capital exposure.

Ethereum price outlook and future drivers: Tokenization and agentic AI will reshape the $300 trillion crypto market

Tom Lee: When we forecast Ethereum’s price, I think it largely depends on Bitcoin’s trajectory. We can look at the price ratio of Ethereum to Bitcoin. I think the long-term average of 0.048 is a useful reference, and the 2021 high point reached 0.087. If we combine this ratio with our estimated fair value of Bitcoin (around $250,000), for example, using the 2021 high ratio, Ethereum’s price would reach $22,000. Therefore, compared with the current price of around $2,300, it is severely undervalued.

As you can see, early in the crypto-spring cycle, Ethereum usually does not immediately produce reflexive, dramatic volatility. So I think in the coming months, people will still have plenty of time to buy crypto assets on dips. But having said that, if the crypto winter ends completely by the end of this year, we will see strong upward market momentum, just like what we are seeing right now in storage-chip concept stocks. And Ethereum is currently emerging from a long consolidation period. Although the current price is around $2,300, you can see that it has actually been consolidating for as long as 5 years.

Looking back at history, Ethereum’s first consolidation ultimately ended with an astonishing 227x rise; after the second consolidation ended, it also brought a 54x increase. Therefore, I believe that this third consolidation will explode, driven by the two major narratives of tokenization and agentic AI (Agentic AI). From its current position, Ethereum may still have 25x upside. So why am I so confident that Ethereum and the entire crypto market are poised for a comprehensive bull run? Essentially because they represent the future form of money.

Elon Musk once said that future systems will no longer use the dollar as currency; instead, they will be based on vast energy networks. What he is referring to, in essence, is computational power—deploying computing facilities in space. His view is very accurate: in the future, the truly scarce resources will be computational power and energy.

Just yesterday, LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman also explicitly stated that cryptocurrencies will become crucial in an AI-dominated world, and he probably did not expect his comments to be cited by Kalshi’s prediction market.

a16z founder Marc Andreessen also proposed that the unification of AI and crypto agents (Crypto Agents) will inevitably require a native currency to enable value transfer.

Even last week, I also saw at a Milken Institute conference—BlackRock CEO Larry Fink—that he said he believes a brand-new asset class will emerge, namely computing-power futures.

In terms of tokenization and stablecoin trading volume, the market has already undergone a dramatic transformation. According to Bitwise’s data, the trading volume of stablecoins has surpassed Visa’s payment scale. This indicates that we have already crossed the critical point for mass adoption. Grayscale released an excellent report, predicting that the tokenization market in the future could reach as high as $300 trillion. Looking back historically, the total value of Layer 1 base networks is typically roughly equivalent to the size of the tokenization market they support. If this valuation logic holds, then the total market cap of cryptocurrencies in the future could also reach $300 trillion.

Although I’m not sure whether this proportion will remain exactly the same in the future, the core logic is absolutely correct: as Grayscale said, the underlying networks that carry massive tokenized economic activity will inevitably capture enormous economic value. Therefore, if the total future tokenization market size is $300 trillion, and today the entire crypto market is only $2 trillion, then I believe the value of crypto networks in the future will obviously far exceed the current $2 trillion.

Industry transformation and corporate layout: Crypto-native enterprises will replace traditional banks

Tom Lee: I think this means that future banks will be completely replaced by DeFi and crypto-native enterprises. Let me give you a clear example. Today, the most profitable traditional bank in the world is JPMorgan Chase. It is expected to achieve up to $60 billion in profit this year, which is an extremely large number. But to reach this goal, they need to maintain a huge team of 300,000 employees. Now, let’s shift our focus to Tether and Jane Street. Jane Street is a top crypto market maker. In essence, they also move capital flows like a bank. But the difference is that they focus on using highly computerized systems to transfer funds at high speed.

They earned $40 billion in profit last year, nearly matching JPMorgan Chase’s scale, but with only 3,000 employees. In other words, they are far better in terms of per-capita profit returns and return on invested capital. Let’s take a look at a crypto-native company like Tether as well: it has only 300 employees, yet creates an astonishing $1.5 billion in profit. So, in my view, if you combine the data from Tether and Jane Street, their total profit already exceeds JPMorgan Chase, while their total number of employees combined is only around 3,300.

The core point I want to make here is: digital-native enterprises that use blockchain as their underlying settlement network eliminate to a very large extent the cumbersome intermediaries and labor costs in traditional finance, ultimately enabling them to earn extremely high profits. Therefore, I boldly predict that within the next 10 years, among the world’s top-ranked major financial institutions, half will be digital-native crypto enterprises.

This is by no means far-fetched. The reason is that we can look back at the history of development of other industries. Imagine when the internet was just emerging—if someone claimed that 10 years later, those traditional newspaper media giants would still be solid, firmly dominant, and unchallenged, what would happen? The reality is obviously not like that. They were all completely disrupted and replaced without exception.

Bitmine’s new capital allocation direction: ETH staking, AI investment, and MrBeast

Tom Lee: If you observe the entire media industry, the same story is playing out. In the wave of digitalization, all these established traditional media companies will hand over market share to emerging giants like Netflix. Of course, I also witnessed this firsthand in the telecom industry, where I spent most of my professional career. Wireless communication companies eventually fought back and became the most central players in the entire industry. Their scale and influence already far surpass traditional telecom systems.

So I think we are considering accumulating Ethereum at a slightly slower pace, because there are other important things to do in crypto right now. We have just successfully listed on the main board and announced a $4 billion buyback plan, as we see it as a more efficient use of our capital. We are also working very actively with any clients who are interested in staking businesses, because we launched the relevant commercial services at the end of March.

At present, we have staked a total of $14 billion worth of crypto assets. This already exceeds our current holdings of Ethereum itself. In fact, we have already staked about 85% of our own Ethereum holdings, but at the same time we also custody other people’s crypto assets, including Solana and Canto. Our goal is to further expand revenue from third-party staking beyond staking income from our own Ethereum holdings. Now, our annualized staking income has already exceeded $300 million, which is roughly $1 million per day. If we also factor in our current cash reserves of about $700 million, Bitmine has clearly already achieved strong profitability, with daily net cash flow exceeding $1.2 million.

In addition, we invested in an AI company called Eightco, whose stock ticker is ORBS. If you’re not familiar with them, this is actually a holding company and the largest holder of the World project. That is the project dedicated to realizing “Proof of Personhood,” founded by Sam Altman. We have many reasons to be bullish on WLD, and it is also an important component of Eightco’s balance sheet. But as you can see here, Eightco also holds a substantial amount of shares in OpenAI and MrBeast.

Therefore, you can think of it as a closed-end fund that lets you directly access several core components of future AI agent systems, while also meeting your needs to protect your interests in the AI era. I think a good comparable is a company like Fundrise, whose stock ticker is VCX. As you can see, they hold a portfolio of high-quality private company investments that ordinary people typically find difficult to participate in. Fundrise’s trading price premium has reached 6 times net asset value. Similarly, Eightco also allows you to access all of the top companies mentioned above, but compared with VCX, its current trading price has a significant discount. If you’re not very familiar with World yet, it is becoming increasingly industry-relevant. Eightco often releases very high-quality press releases that go deep into the latest developments in the AI field.

We also made a strategic $200 million investment in top creator MrBeast. I think many younger generations are very familiar with MrBeast, but what we are most interested in is their grand vision to build the next phenomenon-level financial platform. They have already acquired Step. We firmly believe MrBeast will become the Robinhood, Chime, and SoFi for the Z-generation and Alpha generation.

It’s worth reiterating that, for us, we are currently MrBeast’s largest corporate shareholder. We put in $200 million. Remember: MrBeast’s core target audience will inherit an enormous amount of wealth over the next 20 years through intergenerational wealth transfer.

Performance and future valuation: Ethereum price will rise to $250,000 as the tokenization market expands

Tom Lee: In the final few minutes of my remarks, I only want to talk about Bitmine and our positioning as a digital asset treasury. I believe it is crucial to outperform the underlying crypto assets in returns—and that is exactly what we have already successfully achieved.

Let me show you some specific data. From June 30 last year—when Bitmine was established—to December 31, Ethereum rose 22%, but you can see Bitmine’s rise reached 503%, which is about 48,000 basis points better. Entering 2026, Ethereum is actually down year-to-date. But I believe it will ultimately close strongly higher.

Bitmine’s drawdown is relatively small, so it still outperforms the underlying crypto assets. This is actually not surprising, because if you plot Ethereum’s price on the X-axis and Bitmine’s price on the Y-axis, you will find that the biggest leverage driving Bitmine’s share price increase is Ethereum’s trajectory. After all, Ethereum is the largest part of our balance sheet. So it is no surprise that the correlation between them is as high as 90%.

If that correlation holds, we can layer different target price models for Ethereum. I previously showed why we believe $22,000 is a reasonable price expectation—this is based solely on the Ethereum-to-Bitcoin price ratio at Ethereum’s 2021 high. Under this valuation, if you believe in the big trend of tokenization and agentic AI systems, Bitmine becomes a $500 stock.

So you should feel excited about Ethereum’s future. It is an extremely scarce settlement layer, fully native and original, and it has never experienced any downtime. If Ethereum reaches $62,000—meaning a price ratio of 0.25 to Bitcoin—then Bitmine would be a $1,500 stock. You know that industry leaders like Securitize and Joe Lubin indeed believe that tokenization will eventually grow into a multi-trillion-dollar market, with a large portion of transactions happening on Ethereum.

In this optimistic scenario, Ethereum’s price could reach $250,000. By the way, Ethereum is currently deflationary. Since we started buying Ethereum on June 30 last year, Ethereum’s net supply has been in negative growth. If it reaches that market size, Bitmine’s stock price will soar to $5,000.

So, in our view, Bitmine’s risk-reward profile is highly attractive, because we not only hold core assets, but also broadly invest in many ecosystem businesses and frontier investment ventures. This includes a large-scale Ethereum staking business, as well as numerous frontier exploration projects with very strong upside (Moonshots). Of course, purely from the basics of this stock’s core business, we believe it can generate a stable cash flow of $1 million per day.