Famous investor and head of BitMine Immersion Technologies Tom Lee describes an encouraging long-term scenario for Ethereum investors, while ETH itself has been falling for the whole year to date.
Tom Lee, the chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), Fundstrat co-founder and famous crypto investor, has spoken at the Proof of Talk conference, that was held on June 2-3 in Paris this year, claiming that Ethereum is one of the most promising cryptocurrencies out there, and its price could potentially reach $250,000.
The optimistic vision is notable as currently ETH is trading at mere $1760. Its price has fallen over 32% in the last twelve months, and keeps getting lower driven by the general crypto crash observed today. Within the last five days, ETH declined by 13% and even rosy perspectives from influential institutional investor didn’t stop the cryptocurrency fall.
Lee’s forecast does not refer to the near future, as the visionary speaker described long-term perspectives for the Ethereum ecosystem. In his opinion, growth is to be expected coming from the structural changes of ETH role in financial systems. Namely, Lee links Ethereum prospects with its support of “machine-to-machine economy,” AI and tokenizaion of real-world assets (RWAs). Today, stablecoins like USDT or USDC already dominate on Ethereum and L2s, while its smart contracts can automatically execute payments for AI agents as well as humans. However, this technology is early-stage and its larger scale is yet to come.
Another notable point of Tom Lee’s statements is that control over the Ethereum network is gradually shifting from Ethereum Foundation to large corporations who effectively become corporate validators. At present, the EF already doesn’t have much control over the ETH supply and faces lots of public criticism. It holds approximately 0.16% of all ETH, while other protocol foundations typically control between 10% and 50% of their native token supply.
Meanwhile, Bitmine itself has about 5.4 million ETH (about 4.5% of total Ethereum assets on the market). The company is currently the world’s largest publicly traded Ether treasury. At the same time, other public enterprises also own large shares of ETH, allowing them to launch staking infrastructure and empowering to take over guardianship of the Ethereum (ETH) network.
Despite ETH-linked losses for the past year, Tom Lee’s Ethereum strategy has not reversed course. The company has earlier indicated it still intends to reach a target of 5% of the total ETH supply by December. To maintain its financial position in rough times for crypto and raise some funding, Bitmine is launching a $300 million preferred stock offering at a stated value of $100 per share with a 9.5% annual dividend rate.
In mid-2025, when Ethereum reached its all-time-high of over $4,950, Tom Lee predicted that ETH could reach $15,000 by the end of 2025. Instead, the crypto fell to $2,990.
