TOM LEE: "$250,000 Bitcoin Is the Logical Conclusion" (Here’s Why)

Added: 2026-05-15

[00:00:00]Ethereum is the best performing asset since the start of the Iran war. It's performing as a wartime store value. If Bitcoin gets to 250,000, which we think is fair value in the next 12 months.

[00:00:13]And Ethereum gets to its the 8-year average of the price ratio, that's 12,000 Ethereum. That's a lot of upside from here.

[00:00:20]If it gets to the 2021 high, that's 22,000 Ethereum.

[00:00:26]Keep in mind, those are two numbers to watch. And if ETH becomes the payment rails of the future, which we believe is the case, that would imply $62,000 Ethereum. What exactly would Bitcoin have to do in order to reach a million dollars? If Bitcoin compounded at 65% for 5 years, then Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. If Bitcoin simply compounded at 28% every year for 10 years, Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. If Bitcoin compounded at 13% a year for 20 years, then Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. Tom Lee argues Ethereum is the ultimate wartime store of value, predicting a surge to $62,000 as it becomes the world's payment rails.

[00:01:05]Meanwhile, Anthony Pompliano highlights that Bitcoin hitting $1 million isn't fantasy. It only requires a 28% [music] annual compound growth over the next decade. As institutional adoption scales and money printing persists, [music] both experts see crypto transitioning from speculative assets to the foundational pillars of global finance.

[00:01:25]Before we go on, please take a moment to like this video, subscribe to the channel, and turn on post notifications for more content like this. Every action helps with the YouTube algorithm and greatly supports the channel's growth.

[00:01:37]Thanks for your support and enjoy the video. I know that many of you believe that we're still in the fog of war, and it is indeed true, the US is in the midst of a conflict with Iran. But what you have to focus on is that Ethereum has now risen for three months consecutively.

[00:01:54]And in fact, [music] if Ethereum closes May above 2100, that would be [music] the third consecutive month.

[00:02:01]As I'm highlighting here, there's never been a crypto winter where Ethereum has closed up three consecutive months in a row. In other words, the fact that we're up three months in a row means crypto winter is over. Another way to think of this is to look at uh software stocks and Ethereum both have been highly correlated to each other.

[00:02:22]And as you can see, software stocks have risen along with Ethereum.

[00:02:27]In fact, at Fundstrat, software is now among our top sector picks as of May 1.

[00:02:34]So, that gets us to uh some facts that Ethereum is the best-performing asset since the start of the Iran war. It's performing as a wartime store of value.

[00:02:45]And here's the thing. It's been a great diversification tool since 2016. Take a look at this first column that's highlighted. Let's look at different allocations you could have done in terms of owning Ethereum on December 3rd December 31, 2016. From 0% all the way to 33%.

[00:03:02]And these are the [music] starting dollar values. So, if you had $100,000, for instance, and you put 5% into Ethereum, that was $5,000 invested. This highlighted column is what it would be worth today. So, your $5,000 investment would have grown to 1.5 million.

[00:03:19]In other words, if you compare that to having zero allocated to Ethereum, okay?

[00:03:26]And you look at your total portfolio today, it's 230,000 if you had no exposure to Ethereum versus 1.7 million if you had 5% allocated to Ethereum. In other words, you would have a seven times total increase in your total portfolio with just a 5% exposure to Ethereum. Now, another way to think of this is how much of each asset would you need to own to protect yourself against a 50% decline in the S&P 500.

[00:03:55]Okay, so this is the required hedge.

[00:03:58]You would need just 0.4% 10 years [music] ago in Ethereum to protect yourself against a basically a wipeout of the stock market.

[00:04:08]Gold, which is considered a store value, you'd have to add 37% of your portfolio.

[00:04:13]So, you can see the point here.

[00:04:15]You'd want to own [music] just a small piece of Ethereum as a source of diversification and as a hedge. [music] Now, Ethereum does track Bitcoin, so I think you should look at the price ratio. And the current price ratio is below not only the 8-year average, but the 2021 high at 0.087.

[00:04:36]And you've [music] seen this chart from us before.

[00:04:39]If Bitcoin gets to 250,000, which we think is fair value in the next 12 months, and Ethereum gets to its the 8-year average of the price ratio, that's 12,000 Ethereum. That's a lot of upside from here.

[00:04:53]If it gets to the 2021 high, that's 22,000 Ethereum.

[00:04:58]Keep in mind, those are two numbers to watch. And if ETH becomes the payment rails of the future, which we believe is the case, that would imply $62,000 Ethereum. So, clearly a lot of upside from here.

[00:05:10]And Ethereum is exiting a long consolidation, something I've talked about before. You can see this current consolidation is 5 years.

[00:05:17]But those other consolidations resulted in pretty explosive upside moves. 227 times after the 2016 consolidation, and after the 2020 consolidation, a 54x for Ethereum.

[00:05:31]So, I think this next upside is going to be led by tokenization and agentic [music] AI.

[00:05:38]So, let's talk about the future of money.

[00:05:41]Now, Elon Musk said something pretty profound recently.

[00:05:44]He says that this future system won't use dollars as currency, [music] just mass and energy. What he's really referring to is that compute and energy are the two scarce assets. [music] In fact, Larry Fink at BlackRock believes that compute will actually become a new asset class, and that will be buying futures of compute.

[00:06:05]>> [music] >> Reid Hoffman, the billionaire founder of LinkedIn, said that crypto will become critical in an AI world.

[00:06:13]Okay.

[00:06:14]Well, let's think about stablecoin transactions, which we had said last year was the ChatGPT moment for crypto, and you can see stablecoin volumes [music] now exceed Visa payments. This is according to data from Bitwise.

[00:06:28]And Grayscale believes that the tokenized market is going to reach $300 as we tokenize real estate, fixed income, equities, derivatives, commercial real estate, basically everything.

[00:06:41]What does this mean for layer one blockchains? Well, this is Ethereum, which is in pink, and the total value locked of tokenized assets. And you can see Ethereum moves pretty closely with that tokenization.

[00:06:57]Meaning that, according to Grayscale, networks that host a large share of tokenized activities may capture a meaningful portion of economic value.

[00:07:06]>> [music] >> In other words, if Ethereum is the leading tokenization platform, >> [music] >> its price will go up a lot.

[00:07:12]And Marc Andreessen, who's a very visionary about the future, says the grand unification of AI and crypto are age AI agents, cuz they're going to need money.

[00:07:23]And we've talked about this before, that there's numerous reasons why blockchains are a better way for AI agents to use money.

[00:07:31]Okay. Well, let's bring this all together.

[00:07:34]If tokenization [music] is the future of assets, and money's becoming [music] digital, and AI agents are going to use money, well, we should think about what it means for the most profitable banks in the future.

[00:07:48]Well, today JP Morgan is the most profitable bank in the world with 59 billion of net income projected this year, almost 60 billion, and 300,000 employees.

[00:07:58]But let's mix in two new types of companies, Jane Street, which just is a trading firm, and Tether.

[00:08:06]Jane Street's on track to make 40 billion dollars this year, with 3,000 employees, 1/1000 [music] the number of employees at JP Morgan.

[00:08:15]In fact, Jane Street in the first quarter of this year is reporting about 10 billion in net income.

[00:08:21]That means moving money, which is what Jane Street [music] does, is starting to capture more value than the entire operations of a global bank.

[00:08:29]Again, going back to this chart, Jane Street makes more money than Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs.

[00:08:39]Okay.

[00:08:41]And then let's look at Tether, which [music] is the largest stablecoin operator in the world. It's going to earn about 15 billion this year with 300 employees.

[00:08:49]So, 1/1000 the number of employees of JP Morgan. [music] These are two new types of financial institutions. Didn't exist [music] 20 years ago.

[00:09:01]But keep in mind, that's sort of the story that technology, as it gets introduced to sectors, creates disruption and it reduces the value of incumbency. Now, I'm going to highlight a bunch here. Automobiles.

[00:09:14]We don't remember any of the horse buggy makers, we only think of the new entrants.

[00:09:18]With mobile, all these old names really largely don't exist. It's mostly mobile today.

[00:09:25]In digital media, nobody really remembers names like Hearst, Viacom, News Corp as the giants.

[00:09:32]They were the giants in their day, today it's more Google, Meta, and TikTok.

[00:09:35]>> [music] >> Even more recently, cloud computing.

[00:09:38]Before cloud computing, there were PC names, IBM, Compact, Dell, Gateway.

[00:09:43]They've given away to Amazon, Microsoft Azure, Oracle, Google Cloud.

[00:09:48]And finally, in EVs.

[00:09:50]These traditional automakers are still around, but Tesla is far bigger. So, markets tend to overestimate the value of incumbency.

[00:09:59]And it's really the new entrants that capture a lot of that value. Well, what does that mean? I believe in the next 10 years, half of the largest financial institutions in the world are going to be native digital companies. [music] Native digital asset companies. Many of them in crypto.

[00:10:17]And finally, let's talk about Bitmain.

[00:10:20]Bitmain's been building in the crypto winter. The first thing we did was invest in Aiko, which is an intersection of AI and identity.

[00:10:27]It's a publicly traded company, ticker ORBS.

[00:10:31]And >> [music] >> one of their biggest assets is their holdings of Worldcoin.

[00:10:37]Worldcoin is helping verified humans to prevent networks and systems that we used to be polluted by >> [music] >> digital bots. I mean, take a look today.

[00:10:48]Basically, from everything from Polymarket to web traffic to emails, even to x.com and Reddit, are really starting to see more of the volume come from non-humans.

[00:10:59]In fact, Reddit wants to consider using face Face ID for human verification.

[00:11:05]Aiko owns a stake in OpenAI, Worldcoin, and Mr. Beast.

[00:11:11]So, think of it as very similar to a company called Fundrise, ticker VCX. Whereas, Fundrise trades at six times NAV, Aiko is undervalued.

[00:11:22]The second is Bitmain launched Maven, which is the largest single staking operator in the world.

[00:11:30]Um we launched commercial service at the end of March of this year. We have more than 14 billion of assets staked and we're staking about 2 billion of client assets currently including um, other tokens Hyperliquid and Solana and Canton.

[00:11:45][music] As you can see, the staking operations are gen- are a- are generating quite a lot of rewards for >> [music] >> Bitmain.

[00:11:55]Over 300 million today but on track to be 352 million [music] um, once we've fully staked.

[00:12:04]We also invested into Mr. Beast. Um, I've talked about that before but he is the largest content creator in the world but he also bought Step Financial to turn it into a financial services company.

[00:12:15]I think for Gen Z and Gen Alpha, he's going to be the Robinhood, SoFi, [music] and Chime combined.

[00:12:20]And of course there's a huge wealth transfer coming for Gen Z and Gen Alpha. We uplisted to the NYSE big board. That's a pretty big deal. And finally, we reached 4% of the Ethereum total coin supply. [music] Bitmain was created on June 30th of 2025 and the first 1% of the Ethereum supply came in August. And as you can see the different milestones here, on April 10th, we reached 4%.

[00:12:50]Now, we're pretty At this pace, we could reach 5% very quickly. But we actually want to slow the pace of accumulation.

[00:12:58]Um, but we still expect to reach 5% of Ethereum sometime in 2026. And as far as prices goes, keep in mind we're a digital asset treasury. So, we're going to track the price of Ethereum [music] but we want to outperform Ethereum.

[00:13:13]For instance, in 2025, Ethereum was up 22% from June 30th to year end, Bitmain rose 500% [music] which means it outperformed by 48,000 base points.

[00:13:25]So far this year, Ethereum's down 18% and Bitmain's down 15, so it's outperforming by 310 basis points.

[00:13:34]But of course, if Ethereum goes up, so should Bitmain's price. The correlation is still around 90%.

[00:13:41]So, uh recall those price targets we had.

[00:13:45]22,000 for Ethereum, 62,000 for payment rail, and of course 250,000 using both Joe Lubin's price target for Ethereum and Securitize's recent price target for Ethereum.

[00:13:59]Well, that would value Bitmain's shares at 500 at 22,000, [music] 1,500 at 62,000, and 5,000 per share at 250,000. So, you can see quite a lot of side. Tom Lee's thesis ultimately extends far beyond cryptocurrency prices. He is describing a transition from an analog financial system toward a digitally native economic architecture built on programmable networks, tokenized assets, autonomous AI agents, and decentralized payment rails. Within that transformation, Ethereum occupies a uniquely strategic position. Pomp Leon begins by highlighting a remarkable shift in mainstream financial discourse.

[00:14:40]Predictions of $1 million Bitcoin are no longer confined to fringe internet communities or anonymous online traders.

[00:14:47]They are now coming from globally recognized financial figures with substantial influence over institutional capital. All of a sudden, everyone is predicting that Bitcoin is going to hit a million dollars per coin. Is this actually possible? That's what we're going to investigate today. And if it is possible, on what timeline could Bitcoin hit a million dollars?

[00:15:06]Now, before we get into the math behind this and what the potential drivers could be to accomplish a million dollars per coin, let's first look at what everyone is predicting. We can start with Michael Saylor, who says that if the world knew what he knows, Bitcoin would be at $10 million a coin. Take a listen. If people in the rest of the world knew what I know and they understood and they agreed with me, Bitcoin would go to $10 million tomorrow.

[00:15:29]>> [music] >> And if Bitcoin went to $10 million tomorrow, I want you to think about how you would feel and how your viewers would feel because you would lose 20 years of stacking opportunity during which you get to buy at less than $10 million.

[00:15:47]So, the difference between $10 million and $100,000, that's what you give up if the volatility goes away and people start to agree with you.

[00:15:56]>> Mhm. Now, Michael Saylor's not the only person who thinks that Bitcoin's going to $10 million.

[00:16:00]Billionaire Tim Draper, he says that trillions of dollars are going to flow into Bitcoin and he also predicts Bitcoin at $10 million.

[00:16:07]Take a listen. Not only is Bitcoin against the dollar a really good bet, it's you're seeing the dollar fall as fast as you're seeing Bitcoin grow. Mhm. And that combination is going to, you know, it'll hit 250,000, but it's going to hit a million, it's going to hit 10 million on its way to where the dollar is no longer accepted, no longer worth it, and Bitcoin is the one source of store of value and currency for the world eventually. Now, those are pretty interesting thoughts from Tim there.

[00:16:41]Cathie Wood thinks that Bitcoin is going to $1.5 million by 2030. Take a listen to why she says the banks were sitting on the sidelines, but now that they're participating, she thinks a million.5 by 2030. Your price target for Bitcoin is bull case north of $1 million US.

[00:16:58]So, if you hit that bull case for more than $1 million USD Bitcoin, has your forecast timeline to reach that price now shortened? Yes, that target what we uh evolved in uh it was before the SEC uh gave us gave us the green light and I think that was a major milestone and it has pulled forward the timeline. Um, one thing I will say right now no wirehouse, so whether we're talking about Morgan Stanley uh, or uh, Merrill Lynch, B of A or uh, UBS or Wells Fargo no no plat has approved uh, Bitcoin yet.

[00:17:44]So, all of this price action has happened before they approved you know, we haven't even begun. So, what's your timeline for 1 million USD Bitcoin now and is there perhaps a price target beyond that now? Yes, our target is above that. Uh, we've got a 2030 target. So, uh, it's well above that and and uh, with our new expectations for institutional involvement uh, the incremental price that that uh, we assume for institutions um, [music] actually has more than doubled. So, uh, you know, I don't want to give out any [music] particular uh, uh, prices but because we don't know >> [music] >> um, how quickly we don't know how quickly um, some the the more independent registered investment advisers in the United States, those platforms are saying give us 3 months to do our due diligence. The others are saying we need at least 6 months. So, [music] you know, uh, I I would put those in the institutional bucket as well. But in your view, Cathie, all of the factors are moving the price of this in an upwards trajectory. Yes, indeed.

[00:18:55]It's pretty interesting to hear Cathie Wood, someone who is very well respected on Wall Street, talking about Bitcoin going to 1.5 million. So, there you have it. Whether it's Michael Saylor, Cathie Wood, Tim Draper, Matthew Siegel, Adam Back, Eric Trump or many others, they continue to say 1 million, 1 and a half, or $10 million.

[00:19:14]These are big numbers for an asset that's simply sitting around $80,000 today. But what's the math behind this?

[00:19:21]What exactly would Bitcoin have to do in order to reach a million dollars? Well, [snorts] we can go and we can take a look. If Bitcoin compounded at 65% for 5 years, then Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. If Bitcoin simply compounded at 28% every year for 10 years, Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. If Bitcoin compounded at 13% a year for 20 years, then Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. And lastly, if Bitcoin compounded at 9% a year for 30 years, then Bitcoin would hit a million dollars. Now, when you hear numbers like 65%, 28%, these are big numbers compared to the stock market. But if we go back and we look at what happened over the last 10 years, looking backwards in the rearview mirror for both gold and the S&P, both of those assets, they compounded annually at 14%. So, the compound annual growth rate for gold and the S&P was 14% for the past decade.

[00:20:14]That means that if Bitcoin was to hit a million dollars over the next decade, it would simply have to double the return of gold or the S&P. That doesn't seem crazy, cuz if you go and you actually look, Bitcoin over the last 10 years compounded at a rate of 68% for the decade. So, Bitcoin's compound annual growth rate could fall more than 50% from where it was, and if it continued to hold at at least 28% for a decade, Bitcoin would hit a million bucks. Now, this brings the question of if the math is clear of how Bitcoin goes from 80,000 to a million, what exactly could drive us there? Well, I think that there are four major things that everyone needs to understand in order to see how Bitcoin could go to a million. The first is that Bitcoin would have to stop bleeding. We need the bottom to be in of this bear market. Lyn Alden believes that not only is the bottom in, but also that the fast capital has left and the sellers are exhausted. Take a listen to her logic right here. Historically, Bitcoin tends to have these kind of longer, flatter bottoms than, say, certain stocks because, you know, there's no like you know, like a stock, for example, can have like an earnings catalyst. Every, you know, four times a year it comes out with an earnings report and because it's priced to the upside, and suddenly all this news comes in and just the stock soars. Uh because Bitcoin is money, it doesn't have earnings. Uh you know, and so it like news tends to change a little bit slower around it, especially now that we already have things like spot ETFs and stuff. Um I view it less as kind of these upside news events and more uh other factors, which is one um you see over time you see a rotation of the the fast money's already out, so you get seller exhaustion. Now, whether it's already all like entirely out yet still is an open question. Like it is like my base case that the bottom is in, but it might not be. But at least a lot of the fast capital is already out. Uh we we've seen kind of coins rotate to to strongly more strongly held hands. I think that's a that's a really important kind of factor in kind of building the next base. So, if Lynette is correct, which I think that she is, and we actually have seen the bottom of the Bitcoin bear market, then the question becomes where do the net new buyers come from? And I think that's where we're going to get three major buyers. First, we can look to governments. There's not a lot of governments around the world that currently own Bitcoin, but the theory is that lots of governments will want to own Bitcoin over the next decade or so.

[00:22:28]So, if the bottom's in, if countries are buying, and also large financial institutions are buying, then the last question is what would get individuals to buy more Bitcoin as well? And the simple answer there is money printing.

[00:22:40]And I think that our generation understands more so than any generation in the past the US government and governments around the world are never ever ever going to stop printing money.

[00:22:51]If they never stop printing money, that means they will never stop devaluing the dollar or other fiat currencies. If they don't stop devaluing those currencies, then that means you, as an individual investor, have to find assets to go and store your hard-earned economic value.

[00:23:05]Now, Bitcoin's not the only solution.

[00:23:07]You can go do this in gold, real estate, or many other assets. But, I do believe that the Bitcoin generation, the millennials and below, they have been convinced that one of the best stores of value is Bitcoin. And so, if countries are buying, financial institutions are buying, the government is printing, and retail is buying, then that likely is all of the demand that we would need to have for Bitcoin to continue to compound annually at 28% every year for a decade. And if Bitcoin compounds at 28% a year for a decade, Bitcoin will hit a million dollars. And so, the big question of can Bitcoin hit a million dollars? 100% absolutely. When will it happen? I'm not sure. I don't have a crystal ball. But, compounding at 28% a year for a decade doesn't seem crazy to me. That's double what gold and the S&P did for the past decade. Bitcoin is much more volatile asset. I think it's more valuable than those assets, and therefore 28% seems reasonable to me. And so, if you said to me, "Pick a number and pick a date." Those seem to be pretty good inputs. But, who knows?

[00:24:09]We don't know what will happen in the macro environment. We don't know what will happen in technology. We don't know also how investors will change their mind when allocating capital. All of those things play into this analysis, but at the end of the day, can Bitcoin hit a million bucks? 100%. And if you said to me, "A compound annual growth rate of 28% over the next decade." That doesn't seem crazy. So, my guess is during our lifetime, we're going to see Bitcoin hit two commas. That's it for today's show. Thank you guys so much for watching. Please remember to subscribe to this YouTube channel. My goal is to get to 1 million subscribers, and every single one of you that subscribe helps us get there, and I'll see all of you next time.

[00:24:49]Anthony Pompliano's argument for $1 million Bitcoin is ultimately not based on fantasy, hype, or blind optimism. It is based on compounding mathematics, monetary history, institutional adoption trends, and the accelerating search for scarce stores of value in an era of relentless fiat expansion.