Tom Lee’s Shocking Bitcoin Price Verdict: Why Wall Street Already Lost the Fight!

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]The new entrants gained a lot of power relative to incumbency because of technological innovation, and I think that's what's happening in crypto today. So, it makes sense that the boomers are descending on crypto, but my guess is that in in 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native companies. So, it's still very early days, and I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the base layer winner in the work we do is, you know, is Bitcoin is going to be arguably the most important blockchain because it's really good at storing value, and then Ethereum because it's really the compute layer. What if the biggest opportunity in crypto isn't some random meme coin, but the complete rebuilding of the global financial system? While most people still think crypto is all about speculation and hype, market strategist Tom Lee says something much bigger is happening behind the scenes. Wall Street banks are quietly moving on to blockchain technology. AI systems may soon rely on crypto infrastructure. Bitcoin is becoming institutionalized, and according to Lee, within the next decade, some of the largest banks in the world could be completely digital native companies built on blockchain rails. At the same time, he warns that most crypto projects are already dead, even if investors refuse to admit it.

[00:01:23]Please take a little time to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on post notifications for more videos like this. You can also check out our other videos on cryptocurrencies and the overall digital asset space, and drop your comments and observations in the comment section below.

[00:01:41]Everything you do helps with the YouTube algorithm and immensely contributes to the channel's growth. Thanks, and enjoy the video. Give us a round up of what's going on in that world today. How things looking in the crypto community, and is it all just a bunch of boomers now, or what's the story?

[00:01:57]Crypto has underperformed expectations.

[00:02:01]If someone was to look at why crypto matters, today I think there's two stories that are really central to what blockchain does really well.

[00:02:11]One is of course instant settlement and the ability to sort of confirm transactions quickly and that's why Wall Street is tokenizing on the blockchain and it's not even just a theory anymore.

[00:02:24]I was at Consensus, one of the big conferences last week in Miami. Actually was spent the first part of that week at Milken.

[00:02:31]And actually both at Milken and at Consensus the corporates, the financial institutions were all talking about how tokenization is a big unlock for their business. Because not only does it allow trading to happen 24/7 it'll starts to allow leverage or borrowing or monetizing non-traditional financial assets, whether it's like real estate or art, etc. So it's a real thing.

[00:03:00]And the second of course is AI is going to start to need a neutral way to both prove identity and to start to create transactions and to carry wallets. In fact, that's why Elon Musk kind of famously said multiple times in the last 12 months, you know, in the future money is just mass and energy.

[00:03:19]Meaning the nature of money is essentially computing power.

[00:03:24]That basically it's all describing blockchains and I think the reason it's becoming a boomer story is that the banks, who are the most powerful movers of money in the world realize they can make a lot of money moving things on blockchains. So they they are kind of descending into crypto.

[00:03:46]But at the same time blockchain is enabling the creation of new financial institutions that will compete with banks. And I think we did a presentation at Consensus highlighting this very coalition. JP Morgan makes 60 billion a year, the most profitable bank in the world with 300,000 employees.

[00:04:06]Chainstreet is a firm that is newer. It just moves money around, you know, trading with a lot of quant and compute.

[00:04:16]And this year is probably going to earn 40 billion dollars. They just reported 10 billion in profit in the first quarter with 3,000 employees.

[00:04:25]So, with 1/1000 the number of employees, they're almost as profitable as JP Morgan, and they're making more money than the second, third, fourth largest banks in the world. So, they are more profitable than Goldman, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America.

[00:04:39]Tether, which is a crypto-native, completely digital-native bank selling a stablecoin called [music] Tether, is going to make 15 billion this year, which would rank it as the eighth most profitable bank in the world with 300 employees.

[00:04:55]So, I think that what's happening with blockchain is what happened with digital media, where there were the traditional studios and then there was Netflix. Or with telecom, where there was long distance local and then there was cellular. And that the new entrants gained a lot of power relative to incumbency because of technological innovation. And I think that's what's happening in crypto today. So, it makes sense that the boomers are descending on crypto, but my guess is that in in 10 years, five of the 10 largest banks in the world will be digitally native companies. So, it's still very early days, and I think there's a lot of opportunity, but the base layer winner in the work we do is, you know, is Bitcoin is going to be arguably the most important blockchain because it's really good at storing value and then Ethereum because it's really the compute layer. There could be a lot of supply coming online that hasn't been there at this part of the cycle.

[00:05:57]Does that worry you at all? Do you see it No, this actually might draw more people into the market. How do you think about these big dudes waiting in the wings to uh come public? Paul Tudor Jones was on a podcast recently where he said he knew the top was so easy to see in '99 because he knew there were all these IPOs out there that raised a ton of money but then the lockups were actually also expiring which happens I think it's 90 [music] days. So when SpaceX does its IPO and it'll be one of the most anticipated IPOs in history and raise a huge amount of money in 90 days two trillion of SpaceX stock becomes freely tradeable. And so you can imagine there's a lot of seed investors that are going to take actions to hedge their holdings. I think they said the stat I saw was like 160 people in Austin, Texas for instance are going to make more than $100 million.

[00:06:58]Superficially I would say the size of the IPOs coming SpaceX opening and Tropic and then the supply release 90 days later is something that we have to mechanically think about how the market absorbs all that cuz that's a lot of supply. I mean that's let's say it's collectively 4 trillion.

[00:07:19]It's like 5 6 7% of the S&P 500. You know, it's meaningful numbers of additional liquidity.

[00:07:26]But the one reason I'd say maybe it's not as bearish as it looks is that public stock allocations by high net worth individuals is at near record lows.

[00:07:39]>> [music] >> Whether you look at family offices or pensions they've all allocated into alternatives.

[00:07:46]This is [music] guessing, but in the last 10 years for every dollar that went into public markets, $9 probably went into alternatives.

[00:07:54]So, there is probably more money that is under allocated to public stocks.

[00:08:01]And so, I think that these IPOs, along with how well memory and AI stocks A lot of the AI supply chain is publicly listed in Asia or US is going to trigger reallocation back into public equities. So, I think that there's turbulence, but ultimately all of this gets absorbed because one there's finally some liquidity for some of the venture investors in SpaceX.

[00:08:28]But instead of those folks selling and maybe even triggering tax issues, I think they'll hedge or borrow.

[00:08:35]But I think future allocations are going to shift out of alternatives back into public equities.

[00:08:42]Many people might be more familiar with our more recent views and takes on markets, but I'd say that my favorite call that I ever made in my lifetime was in 2004, over 20 years ago.

[00:08:58]But it was in the middle of a wireless bear market and all the wireless stocks, these were the carriers had gone from, you know, being $20 a share. I think my entire coverage universe was all under $10 a share.

[00:09:14]And so, it was a very deep bear market driven by WorldCom and Enron and the loss of credit access. But the carriers I covered were actually pretty good businesses because they had this business called roaming. They had like rural territories and it was almost like a monopoly business.

[00:09:32]And one stock, Western Wireless had fallen to a dollar 72.

[00:09:40]Okay.

[00:09:41]But I had called our our bond trading desk and those bonds had actually begun to rally. So, like that was the divergence that the bonds were rallying, but the stock was still getting shredded.

[00:09:53]And there was all these rumors that the company was going to hit a wall.

[00:09:57]So, I decided to upgrade that stock and basically I called the bottom to the day.

[00:10:04]And then within 18 months, it was bought by Alltel for $40 a share.

[00:10:08]But that was the first of several upgrades I did where I then I upgraded Alamosa Holdings at 27 cents.

[00:10:16]And then that was bought by Sprint for $22 within 18 months. And so, the stock upside was great, but it was more because I knew these businesses.

[00:10:25]And I learned something. Like Western Wireless had probably 1,000 employees.

[00:10:30]>> [music] >> And what I learned was that when the stock was down, even though the company knew they were doing well, the fact that the stock was at like a dollar 70 made everyone dejected. So, I realized how important stock price was >> [music] >> to how morale is. And then similarly, when stocks do well, it really galvanizes the employee base. So, that was a really important lesson for me. And of course, I was an equity analyst, so I really was covering companies all the time. The second story was probably my bear rating, my sell rating on company called Nextel because I had a bearish view on this company. It was a very popular stock with investors.

[00:11:13]And this the fact that I was at JP Morgan and had a sell rating on a stock widely held by institutions and a big client of JP Morgan made me realize sell ratings are not fun things to do because I I felt enormous pressure.

[00:11:29]Like I suddenly became someone that everyone hated because I did I had a negative view on something that they all like. So, I realized the power of being contrarian, but also like how much heat there is. We still do that today cuz we can turn bullish when everyone's bearish, and it's the same thing. But, being contrarian's not always fun.

[00:11:47]Toward the end of the conversation, Pomp explains how his own AI company led him toward an even deeper understanding of automation. He describes building a financial AI assistant capable of analyzing an individual's entire portfolio and delivering personalized financial insights. And this leads to a broader realization. We are entering what he calls the age of automation. AI automates intelligence. Robotics automate labor. Bitcoin automates monetary policy. Blockchain automates trust and settlement. Everything is becoming more efficient. Pomp explains that trend is massively deflationary over the long run. Why? Because automation reduces friction, labor costs, and inefficiencies across the economy. That's why he believes deflation may actually become a bigger long-term force than inflation. It's a bold thesis.

[00:12:39]You tweeted that very recently. Kind of fitting before this. It kind of threw off what we were the structure and order of our conversation, I guess, cuz you got to start with it. But, why don't you explain what you were saying and go over it again? Let's do this. How about now listen to me. How many of you in here think that 75% of the companies and coins in crypto are going to be here in 5 years?

[00:12:59]Not a single person raised their One person. This guy right here. This guy is very optimistic. Other than him, nobody raised their hand. Why? Because we all know that there's a bunch of nonsense and going on in this industry.

[00:13:09]So, let's just call that out and say that a bunch of people who are building stuff, it's not going to work. That's fine. That's how startups work. That's how innovation works. That's not a bad thing. But, usually what happens in the business cycle is that you have a bunch of capital and talent that gets allocated to ideas. Those ideas, people try to build. The ones that work, they thrive. They succeed. they get bigger, they drive profits, people are able to generate some sort of economic return.

[00:13:32]But the people who don't work, the company goes out of business, which is a very key concept. You either shut down the company, it goes bankrupt, you return capital to investors, and the founder says, "I'm going to move on to my next thing." That does not happen in crypto. Why? Because there are millions of coins that are basically ghost chains now. There is someone somewhere in the middle of Iowa, no disrespect to the people from Iowa, but there's someone in Iowa that's holding the coin and they're saying to themselves, "I think it's going to go up at some point in the future." It's not going back up. It's not coming back. The all-time high was the all-time high forever. And so that's fine. Most of crypto is dead. It's not coming back. There are four areas I think are going to be successful: Bitcoin, stablecoins, equity infrastructure, and tokenization. If you're not working on one of those four areas, peace to my brother. I hope that you are successful, but I think it's going to be a tough ride out there.

[00:14:21]Yeah, I mean, I think if FTT still out there trading. I guess my Think how crazy that is.

[00:14:26]>> [laughter] >> That a token associated with a company that is no longer solvent and the founder is in jail is still trading and there's someone holding it thinking it's going to go back up.

[00:14:36]It has had some pumps, but you never know. I The other thing I would say is like I think everyone agrees with you.

[00:14:41]Like most people have been saying this for years. 90 plus percent of these things are going to go to nothing or be virtually worthless. But I will say, I was here in 2022 and we well, it was in Austin at the time and I walked around at the booths. I didn't know 95% of them. Granted, I'm not truly in the weeds on this stuff. Now, I know most of these names. This seems to be getting more serious, more institutional.

[00:15:01]I Do you think that's a good thing?

[00:15:02]Obviously, based on your tweet, you do think that's a good thing. Well, I think one of the other key components is if you go back to the internet, where did the internet start? It started literally with the pirates in a garage. These people basically were like, "We're going to take on the man." People forget, Bill Gates was the pirate. Steve Jobs was the pirate. Now, Bill Gates, people don't even want him to go near the mosquitoes or touch a vaccine. He's the man now.

[00:15:24]It's because he's been so successful that he went from the pirate to the man.

[00:15:27]That's what Bitcoin's done over the last 15 years. It started out on the internet and a cypherpunk email list and people thought it was crazy. They thought the government was going to shut it down.

[00:15:35]Larry Fink is now the CMO of Bitcoin and he's out talking about how great Bitcoin is.

[00:15:40]Bitcoin won. It's on Wall Street. It is now the man. It is an asset that is going into portfolios. I'm sure you've heard from some of the financial institutions. They're recommending two, three, four percent allocations.

[00:15:51]Wave the white flag. They're not our enemy. Like they they have actually made this thing successful.

[00:15:56]But with that comes what is the next group of pirates? Where is the innovation coming? So if you look to areas like prediction markets or artificial intelligence, etc. That is the next wave of will it work or will it not? You've probably heard people talking about are we going to have too many data centers or is there insider trading on the prediction markets?

[00:16:14]That's the same thing that they were talking about with Bitcoin and criminals only use it. And so understanding these patterns, recognizing these patterns, you start to understand that actually having all the institutions here means that it has been successful. And that means that it's not going away. But guess where the institutions are not.

[00:16:30]They are not buying fartcoin. [music] They are not investing in stupid exchanges that have some crazy mechanism. They are simply looking for what is the thing with the best risk-adjusted return that is resilient and likely to survive. And I think that's where most people's capital is going to end up. So you said everything you're bullish on, stuff you think is going to be around. I mean, that kind of leaves everything else. But really what what is the stuff that you don't think is going to be around? Like how do you determine things that are going to go to zero or functionally zero?

[00:16:54]>> I think I told you earlier, uh if you go to a CoinMarketCap and you go to the 15th coin down, I don't know actually know what is past like I don't know top three coins, but uh somewhere in that range, call it 10, 15, 20 if I'm on the list, just scroll. And you're just looking at zombies. They're all dead dead men walking. Every coin What is it? What what is going on? What what Why is anyone going to put capital into that thing? And you see it. The institutions at this point there was a shot heard round the world when BlackRock, Fidelity, Bitwise, all these people put out the Bitcoin ETF. Guess what immediately happened as soon as they saw that they were going to be successful. Some portfolio manager or some product person pulled up CoinMarketCap and said, "Should we launch Ethereum, Solana?" They and they just went down the list.

[00:17:38]How many of them have they launched? Not that many of them. These people are not dumb. They understand there is not that much capital that is going to go into those products yet. Maybe that changes over time, but we're what? Two, three years since the ETFs launched? I think two years, right?

[00:17:52]>> January 2024 was the first launch in the US.

[00:17:55]>> two and a half years, give or take, from the Bitcoin ETF launch. Could anyone in here name what is the second most successful ETF family of assets other than Bitcoin?

[00:18:06]I mean, I can, but I'm an ETF family.

[00:18:08]>> You're the expert.

[00:18:09]>> [laughter] >> But most people can't, right? And so it goes back to this idea of if the institutions are going to place their bets, they're going to try to place their bets exactly where they're placing them. Bitcoin, stablecoins, tokenization, these trends they have much more confidence in than they do in you know, whatever coin is 17th on the list. Yeah, I I mostly agree. I do think there are going to be diamonds in the rough beyond that 15th at some point, but you're really in picked over risk at that point. It's easier said than done as it is in any sort of investing.

[00:18:38]Um let's shift gears a little bit.

[00:18:39]You're right at the intersection of AI and crypto.

[00:18:42]Um ProShares acquired another company you co-founded, Silver if you want to talk a little bit about that. But like, can you just talk about how you see the intersection of AI and Bitcoin or AI and crypto? I mean, there's obviously an intersection of crypto and macro as well, but let's talk about AI and and crypto for now. So in February of last year, I got very frustrated because I kept going to all these great LLMs, these large language models, and I said to myself, "I want to ask it about my financial life. I want to ask it for insights." And every time I had to ask it a question, I had to basically take a screenshot of my bank accounts, my brokerage accounts, all this stuff, and then upload it in. And I said, "There's got to be a better way."

[00:19:18]And so, one of the best engineers in any of our companies, I sat him down and I said, "I need you to build this for me."

[00:19:24]And so, he started to build it. Now, we've got this product Silvia where you go in and you read authorized, so only read, we don't touch your assets, but you give access to read only to your bank account, your crypto account, your brokerage account, you upload your private investments, cars, collectibles, etc. And then you begin to talk to Silvia. And when every time you ask a question of the LLM, what you are getting is all of the context of your personal portfolio is being fed at the same time. So, if you ask ChatGPT or Claude, "How do I get my tax rate down?"

[00:19:55]it'll give you very generic advice.

[00:19:56]It'll say, "Well, if you have real estate, look at bonus depreciation." It doesn't know whether you own real estate or not. What Silvia does is it understands and it goes asset by asset in your portfolio and answers how do you get your tax rate down, and it's very personalized to you. And so, if you think about, well, what is that doing?

[00:20:11]It is automating insights. Well, what does Bitcoin do? Bitcoin automates monetary policy. It is the most disciplined monetary policy in the world. For 15 years, it has done exactly what it said it was going to do, and it has not deviated in any way.

[00:20:24]>> [music] >> And so, whether we're talking about AI, Bitcoin, robotics, etc., I continue to argue that we are actually not in any one of those industries. We are simply in the age of automation. We are squeezing inefficiencies out of financial markets and out of the economy, and in doing so, we are bringing automation into the world. As we do that, that is highly deflationary, and that is why you are seeing so many headwinds for various assets, and the Fed's hand being forced is because deflation is a much bigger risk than inflation right now.

[00:20:50]>> So, what's [music] the big takeaway from all of this? Tom Lee believes crypto is evolving from speculation into infrastructure. The hype phase may be fading, but the real adoption phase is beginning. Wall Street is entering blockchain. AI may depend on decentralized systems. Bitcoin is becoming institutionalized, and automation is reshaping the entire economy. At the same time, Lee warns investors not to confuse survival with success. Most crypto projects won't make it. Only the strongest networks, the most useful technologies, and the most resilient assets are likely to survive the next era. And in his view, Bitcoin remains at the center of that future.

[00:21:30]Because in a world increasingly run by machines, automation, and digital systems, scarcity, trust, and resilience become incredibly valuable.