Tom Lee: Ethereum will kick off a “second growth curve,” and Wall Street institutions are continuously expanding their ecosystem layout and coverage.

BlockBeats message, July 13. In a speech at WebX 2026, Fundstrat co-founder and Bitmine chairman Tom Lee said that Ethereum is at a critical turning point—similar to the second phase of growth being opened by Amazon, Nvidia, and JPMorgan Chase.

He believes Ethereum also has a similar development path. Since its launch, ETH has gone through the IC0 boom and the NFT boom, and its all-time high reached $4,866. In 2025, it was also driven by the approval of spot ETFs and the rapid adoption of stablecoins, which once pushed it back up to $4,955. Now the price has fallen back to about $1,732, and Tom Lee defines this phase as “the market giving up in the bottom range.” In the future, the growth of ETH 2.0 will be built on four pillars: a completely new Ethereum Foundation governance and management framework; Agentic AI (intelligent agent AI); a settlement layer for the financial system; and ETH becoming a true “currency” in the real sense.

Tom Lee said that Wall Street institutions are continuously expanding their deployment across the Ethereum ecosystem. These major institutions continue to build Layer2 networks, which means the entire traditional financial system is gradually migrating to the Ethereum ecosystem.

When Bitmine was founded, it planned to hold 5% of the total global ETH supply over five years, but now it has achieved 95% of its target in just 12 months. Currently, the company holds a total of 5.74 million ETH, about 4.8% of the total ETH supply. Of this, about 4.87 million ETH (about 85%) has been staked.