Bitmine Chair Tom Lee Says Ethereum Could Surge Past $5,000 This Year
Bitmine Chair Tom Lee explains why Ethereum could hit a new all-time high past $5,000 this year
By Zack Guzman
September 24, 2026
There are Ethereum bulls — and then there is Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee, who is increasingly vocal about why he thinks Ethereum may be on the precipice of a major breakout.
In a new interview with Coinage, Lee predicts that the increasing trend of Wall Street tokenizing assets could power Ethereum to a new all-time high as soon as this year, with ETH breaking its prior high of around $5,000.
The CNBC contributor and head of research at Fundstrat has increasingly grown more confident in Ethereum as the asset has outperformed stocks and the overall AI trade this summer.
"The crypto bull market... we believe it's been already confirmed," Lee said, pointing to ETH's roughly 7,000-basis point lead over the S&P 500 since June. "It's also evident by the stock price gains of crypto related stocks because they are, by a country mile, the best performing assets so far in the third quarter."
But mostly, Lee is betting on a catch up trade forming later this year that will likely sneak up on under-allocated investors. He pointed to the accelerating trend of Robinhood and Coinbase both offering tokenized stocks on their respective Ethereum Layer-2 blockchains as a bullish setup for activity.
"The thing that most stands out to me is Robinhood decided to build on Ethereum, not because they were getting the best price or they were going to try to like fight against fees," Lee said. "But it's because it's the most secure chain and the most liquid."
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Despite the explosion of tokenized stock trading on Ethereum, Lee noted a general ambivalence among investors — even as Ethereum rallied 64% off the 2026 low in June.
"Ethereum from $1,500 to $2,800, I think it's been met with almost complete silence," he said. "In fact, I'm hearing more about large players having substantial losses because they were bearish on this move."
Lee has been putting his money where his mouth is. At Bitmine, the largest Ethereum digital asset treasury company, Lee has been directing new Ethereum buys week after week. In fact, Bitmine has bought ETH each and every week since it set up its treasury strategy in June last year. Now, his company is closing in on its stated goal of acquiring 5% of all outstanding ETH. When asked by Coinage, Lee was coy about confirming a new target the company may announce in the weeks to come.
Nonetheless, Lee reiterated that the setup for this expansion in crypto is quite distinct from those of years past.
"I think that there is a much larger cohort of new investors that are going to come to crypto, and I think that's what differentiates it," he said, distinguishing his predicted new run to $5,000 from the 2017 ICO boom, or the NFT-led cycle after the pandemic lockdowns. "But with tokenization coming in a very large way, and a pro-crypto regulatory backdrop, and then of course, government support at a time when AI... and a lot of applications [are] being built around crypto, I think it's a much larger universe of people that are going to get involved."
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