Who is TOM LEE? From Wall Street influencer to Ethereum micro-strategy creator.

As the chairman of the BitMine board, Lee pointed out that compared to ETF or on-chain custody models, Ethereum financial public companies have five structural advantages.

Written by: Wu Says Blockchain

Thomas Jong Lee, often referred to as Tom Lee, is a well-known stock market strategist, research chief, and financial commentator in the United States.

He was born in Westland, Michigan, USA, as the third child of a Korean immigrant family. His father is a psychiatrist, and his mother transitioned from being a housewife to a Subway franchisee. Lee then attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, majoring in finance and accounting. According to a January 2021 report by The Wall Street Journal, Lee often cooks to relax after a busy day and especially enjoys trying to recreate the Korean dishes his mother made. He is low-key, with an academic style, and rarely rebuts critics but instead tries to respond with data. In an interview, he stated, "I can't argue with critics. I don't know what will happen. The stock market doesn't care about my opinion, so I can only try to understand what the market is saying."

Lee's Wall Street career began in the 1990s, working at Kidder Peabody and Salomon Smith Barney. He joined JPMorgan in 1999 and served as the bank's Chief Equity Strategist from 2007 until his departure in 2014. During his tenure, he gained media attention for his optimistic market views and was also involved in industry controversies for his commitment to critical research.

In 2002, Lee, as a telecommunications analyst at JPMorgan, published a research report on the wireless carrier Nextel, questioning whether its customer churn rate and bad debt provisions were accurately reflected in its accounting practices. On the day the report was released, Nextel's stock price briefly fell by 8%, after which the company's executives strongly retaliated. The CFO and the general counsel respectively called JPMorgan's research head and legal department, accusing Lee of using misleading assumptions and even questioning whether he had leaked part of the report to specific investors before it was officially made public. JPMorgan then conducted a two-week internal investigation, reviewing his emails and call records, ultimately confirming that Lee had not acted improperly. The Wall Street Journal reported on the incident with the headline "Unhappy Firm Bites Back," sparking widespread discussion about the independence of Wall Street analysts. This incident became a representative conflict case in Lee's career and established his research style, which is data-driven and does not cater to market and investment banking client pressures.

In 2014, Lee co-founded the independent research firm Fundstrat Global Advisors and served as the Head of Research, successfully transitioning from a traditional investment bank strategist to the leader of an independent research institution. He was one of the first Wall Street strategists to incorporate Bitcoin into the mainstream valuation framework. In 2017, Lee published a report titled "A framework for valuing bitcoin as a substitute for gold," in which he first proposed that Bitcoin has the potential to partially replace gold as a store of value. The framework is built on three key parameters: the average annual growth rate of the U.S. monetary base (approximately 6.5%), the multiple of the value of alternative assets like gold to the total money supply (approximately 400% in the model), and Bitcoin's potential market share in that alternative value system (with a baseline model of 5%). According to this valuation model, the theoretical value midpoint of Bitcoin in 2022 was $20,300, with sensitivity analysis showing a valuation range between $12,000 and $55,000. Lee noted in the report that as the total market capitalization of crypto assets surpassed $500 billion, central banks and institutional investors might consider incorporating it into their foreign exchange reserves and asset allocation strategies.

In the same year, Lee also introduced his short-term valuation model on a Business Insider program, based on Metcalfe's Law (which states that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the number of users). He used the number of unique Bitcoin addresses as a proxy for users, multiplied by the average daily transaction volume per user, and conducted regression analysis, concluding that this model can explain approximately 94% of Bitcoin price fluctuations since 2013.

Lee's research style emphasizes data-driven analysis and historical analogy, particularly excelling in medium to long-term trend forecasting. In March 2020, when the pandemic triggered a global market crash, Lee was one of the earliest strategists to predict a "V-shaped recovery," firmly advising investors to increase their positions at lower prices. In May 2021, during a brief rebound of Bitcoin from its high point of $60,000 to the $30,000 range, Lee was interviewed by CNBC's "TechCheck" program, reiterating his earlier assertion from December 2020 that Bitcoin would break through $100,000 by the end of the year. He stated, "Bitcoin is inherently extremely volatile, but it is precisely this volatility that creates opportunities for returns," and "even if Bitcoin is currently in a cold storage, I still believe it can surpass $100,000 by year-end." Additionally, as early as 2019, Lee had suggested in a CNBC program that ordinary investors allocate 1% to 2% of their assets to Bitcoin, to which the host responded in surprise, "That sounds kind of crazy." This clip subsequently went viral, becoming a representative moment of his steadfast position on Bitcoin.

In December 2023, Lee suggested in Fundstrat's annual outlook that the S&P 500 would rise to 5,200 points in 2024, while the index was still around 4,600 at the time; this target was achieved ahead of schedule by mid-2024. He then further stated in Bloomberg's "Odd Lots" podcast that, benefiting from corporate earnings growth, valuation reassessment, and technological innovation, the S&P 500 is expected to reach 15,000 points by 2030, and reiterated that Bitcoin has a long-term potential valuation that could reach millions of dollars in the scenario of continued growth in wallet adoption.

In his career, Lee also experienced critical judgment errors. In the 1990s, he was optimistic about the rapid growth of the wireless communications industry as an analyst, but after the internet bubble burst, the related sector fell sharply. Before the 2008 financial crisis, he also underestimated the systemic risks in the real estate market, later admitting that this was one of the biggest lessons he learned — that the stock market's movements highly depend on the confidence of the credit market. In an interview, he stated: "Once the credit market loses confidence, no financial market can remain unaffected." These setbacks prompted him to place more emphasis on cyclical indicators and the structure of capital flows in the future, establishing his research style anchored in historical data.

Lee has been actively involved in mainstream financial programs such as CNBC, Bloomberg, Fox Business, and CNN, and has long served as a special commentator and market strategy analysis guest on CNBC's "Fast Money," "TechCheck," "Halftime Report," and "Closing Bell." He has attracted the attention of investors for his insistence on independent viewpoints and his successful predictions of macro market trends. During the significant decline of the US stock market in 2022, Lee maintained a bullish outlook and posited mid-year that the market had hit bottom, a subsequent trend that confirmed his view, thus earning him the title of a contrarian optimist representative in the "Wall of Worry."

Currently, Tom Lee also serves as an investment strategy advisor at NewEdge Wealth, continuing to express cutting-edge views in the intersection of traditional finance and digital assets.

Strategic Layout: Taking Charge of BitMine, Advancing the Ethereum Financial Model

In June 2025, Lee was appointed as the chairman of the board of BitMine Immersion Technologies (NASDAQ: BMNR), beginning his involvement in the company's strategic transformation from traditional mining to an enterprise-level Ethereum (ETH) reserve structure. BitMine is a digital asset infrastructure company based in Las Vegas, Nevada, initially focused on Bitcoin mining, using immersion cooling technology to enhance energy efficiency and computing power stability, and is committed to building a high-performance, low-cost blockchain computing platform.

In the month of the appointment, the company completed a PIPE private financing, issuing 55,555,556 shares of common stock and related securities, priced at $4.50 per share, raising a total of $250 million. Subsequently, an S-3ASR automatic registration statement was submitted to initiate an ATM (At-The-Market) program of up to $2 billion, with Cantor Fitzgerald and ThinkEquity serving as sales agents. The funds will be used to build an Ether treasury reserve.

As of mid-July, the company disclosed that its total holdings of ETH reached 300,657 coins, with a market value exceeding $1 billion, which includes approximately 60,000 in-the-money options backed by $200 million in cash. Lee stated that the company is moving towards the goal of "acquiring and staking 5% of the total supply of Ethereum."

Subsequently, Founders Fund disclosed a 9.1% equity stake in BMNR, while ARK Invest also acquired 4,773,444 shares of BMNR stock through an over-the-counter agreement, with a transaction amount of approximately 182 million dollars, and announced that it would convert all of it into Ether reserves to support the company's strategy.

In late July, BMNR launched options trading, further enhancing the liquidity of its stock. Latest disclosures show that BitMine's Ether holdings have increased to 566,776 coins, with a market value exceeding $2 billion, nearly 8 times the initial amount of PIPE, making it one of the publicly listed companies with the largest Ether holdings in the world.

Lee: Stablecoins Drive Ethereum to Become the Preferred Choice for Institutions

In a recent interview with Amit Kukreja and CoinDesk, Tom Lee expressed his strong optimism for the Ethereum ecosystem, particularly driven by the trends of stablecoins and tokenization of real-world assets (RWA). He pointed out that the rise of stablecoins constitutes the "ChatGPT moment in the crypto space," with the global market value of stablecoins exceeding $250 billion, of which over 50% of issuance and about 30% of gas fees occur on the Ethereum network. As stablecoins gain support from the U.S. Treasury and Wall Street, Ethereum is gradually becoming a key infrastructure connecting crypto with traditional finance.

As the chairman of the BitMine board, Lee pointed out that compared to ETF or on-chain custody models, Ethereum financial public companies have five structural advantages:

1. You can purchase ETH through issuing new shares when the stock price is higher than the net asset, achieving a reflexive uplift of the net asset value (NAV) per share.

2. It can combine tools such as issuing convertible bonds and selling options to hedge volatility, achieving low-cost or even zero-cost positions while reducing financing costs;

3. The ability to acquire other on-chain financial companies, thereby further amplifying NAV leverage;

4. Expand ETH staking, DeFi yield, on-chain infrastructure and other businesses to build a sustainable cash flow source;

5. Once its ETH holdings occupy a core position in the on-chain ecosystem or become a key node in the stablecoin payment and clearing network, it will have a status similar to that of a "sovereign put" and may become a strategic asset prioritized for acquisition by financial institutions.

Lee emphasized that as platforms like Robinhood launch stock tokenization services through Ethereum Layer 2, more and more institutions are beginning to embrace compliant and scalable blockchain platforms, and Ethereum is currently the only main chain that meets regulatory adaptability, ecological maturity, and scale effects.

In an interview with CoinDesk, he summarized: "Stablecoins have caused the crypto industry to experience an explosion similar to ChatGPT. Wall Street is looking for a chain that can carry real assets while complying with regulations, and Ethereum is becoming that intersection." Fundstrat analysts have set a short-term technical target for ETH at $4,000, believing its fair value could reach $10,000 to $15,000 by the end of the year. Lee stated: "Allocating ETH at the current price point is an effective path for corporate finance to achieve tenfold potential."