Tom Lee's $10B ETH Bet Could Be the Next MicroStrategy (BMNR Explained)

Added: 2026-05-23

[00:00:00]We're still in what many would call the crypto winter right now.

[00:00:04]Bitcoin has pulled back, Ethereum has been beaten up, sentiment is rough, and that's exactly why I want to talk about this today.

[00:00:12]Because the biggest opportunities in the market, the ones that actually change your life, are almost never found when everyone's just excited and we're at all-time highs. They're found when everyone is scared. Think back to 2022, 2023. Nvidia looked like just another chip company. The AI build-out hadn't gone mainstream yet, and people who saw what was coming, who understood what Nvidia's GPUs would mean for the future of artificial intelligence, they had an opportunity most investors completely missed. And they did pretty well. In this video, I'm going to walk you through and break down one of the best setups I believe in the market right now. It involves a name that many of you have heard of, some of you may have not, BMNR, Bitmain Technologies. This is the Tom Lee Treasury play. And when you understand what it is and the setup, I think you'll understand why it's an important position in the market right now. I'll show you the exact trade that I've got on and how I plan to profit big in the coming months ahead. Mash the like button down below if you haven't done so already. I really appreciate it, and it helps to get the video out to more people. So, thank you very much.

[00:01:26]You're certainly welcome to subscribe as well. We're at an all-time high for subscribers, and in the pinned comment down below, there's a free Discord, and you can see all the trades that I put on every single day and the adjustments that I made, and there will be a monthly charge coming up, so be sure and get in now, and you're in free for life. We've got a great like-minded community where we all share trade ideas and trades, and we all make money together. So, who is this Tom Lee, and why should you care? Well, first, Tom Lee is the co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors.

[00:02:03]He's on CNBC talking and giving suggestions and his update on the market >> [snorts] >> almost every day. And he spent years as JP Morgan's chief equity strategist. And he has one of the most accurate track records in the business when it comes to calling major market moves. When Tom Lee made his early calls on Bitcoin, when most people on Wall Street were still laughing at crypto, he was absolutely right. And when he called for a market recovery after the 2022 sell-off, while most strategists were still bearish, again, he was right. And he called the Nasdaq rally. He called the crypto resurgence. He's built an enormous following among institutional investors and sophisticated traders. Here's [snorts] the thing to understand. When Tom Lee makes a directional bet with real capital, institutions, they often follow.

[00:02:59]This isn't a tweet. It's not Well, do they still call it a tweet now that Twitter's called X? I don't know. Let me know in the comments below.

[00:03:06]This isn't a price target in a research note. Tom Lee is putting real money to work through BMNR. He's betting that Ethereum is the most important digital infrastructure asset of the next decade.

[00:03:20]And he's structuring that bet the same way Michael Saylor structured his MicroStrategy Ethereum play, but this is for Ethereum. So, let's start off and just talk about the core thesis here.

[00:03:32]Now, Bitcoin is digital gold. It's a store of value. It's scarce. It's decentralized. It's the reserve asset of the crypto economy. And it's an incredible asset, but Ethereum is something different. Ethereum is programmable money. Ethereum is the infrastructure layer that powers decentralized applications, smart contracts, stable coins, tokenized assets, and DeFi. Think about this analogy. Gold was important. Gold was valuable. Gold was scarce, but oil powered the industrial revolution. Oil ran the machines. Oil moved the ships.

[00:04:11]Oil heated the buildings. Oil was the active ingredient in building the modern economy. Tom Lee believes Ethereum is the digital oil of the next decade. And when you look at what's actually happening in the world right now, the evidence is pretty hard to argue with.

[00:04:29]Now, there's four massive macro forces that are converging right now. Number one, the Genius Act. It's moving through Congress right now. For the first time, the US is creating a federal regulatory framework for stable coins. And why does that matter? Because stable coins, the vast majority of them, run on Ethereum.

[00:04:49]The USDC runs on Ethereum. The USDT runs on Ethereum. When you can send money anywhere in the world in seconds for cents, that's Ethereum infrastructure doing its work. Federal regulation doesn't kill this. It legitimizes it. It opens the door for banks, corporations, and governments to start using stable coin rails officially. Number two, AI agents. They need programmable money.

[00:05:18]This is one that is very under appreciated right now. It's evolving rapidly as well. We're moving from AI assistants to AI agents. Autonomous systems that take actions, make decisions, and operate in the world on behalf of users and businesses. And here's the question nobody's in the mainstream is really asking right now.

[00:05:40]How do AI agents transact? Well, they need programmable, permissionless, instant money. They need smart contracts that execute without human intervention.

[00:05:52]And guess what runs all of that? Yeah, Ethereum.

[00:05:55]The AI agent economy and the Ethereum network are going to be deeply intertwined.

[00:06:01]Number three, institutional tokenization is accelerating. BlackRock, the largest asset manager on the planet, has already launched tokenized funds on Ethereum.

[00:06:13]Their tokenized Treasury fund, Build, B U I D L, I think it's Biddle, I don't know, crossed over a billion dollars in assets. Vlad Tenev, the CEO of Robinhood, recently said that tokenization of real-world real-world assets is going to be one of the biggest financial innovations of our lifetime. I like Hood, I got to look at it where it is right now. I think now is probably a good time to buy. We're talking about real estate in fractional shares, private equity accessible to retail investors, Treasury bonds settling in seconds, and stocks trading 24/7 on blockchain rails. Yeah, I'm not sure if that's going to happen. All of this runs on Ethereum infrastructure. The largest institutions in the world are not building on Bitcoin, they're building on Ethereum. Now, number four, the crypto winter is ending, at least we hope so. Now, look at the history of crypto cycles.

[00:07:15]Every winter ends. Every bear market in crypto has been followed by a recovery that made the previous highs look small.

[00:07:24]Now, importantly, the fundamentals of Ethereum have never been stronger than they are right now. Even while the price has been under pressure, developer activity is high, network usage is growing, institutional adoption is accelerating, and the setup coming out of this winter may be unlike anything we've seen before. And I'm talking about the crypto winter cuz right here it's not winter. All right. So, how does BMNR work? Well, the model's based directly on what Michael Saylor did with MicroStrategy. Here's the core idea.

[00:07:57]MicroStrategy started as a business analytics software company. Saylor converted the company's balance sheet into a Bitcoin treasury. He used the public markets equity raises convertible debt ATM offerings to continuously acquire more Bitcoin. And because Bitcoin appreciated, that NAV, the NAV per share of MicroStrategy grew. The stock didn't just go up because Bitcoin went up. The stock went up because the premium to the NAV expanded as investors realized this was the most efficient regulated liquid way to get large-scale Bitcoin exposure. MicroStrategy, ticker symbol MSTR, went up roughly 30X from its lows. BMNR is doing the same thing but with Ethereum. And importantly, ETH has additional mechanics that make this even more compelling. Right. Now, here's the critical difference between Ethereum and Bitcoin as a treasury asset. When you stake Ethereum, you earn approximately 3 to 5% annually in staking rewards just for holding and validating the network.

[00:09:06]Bitcoin doesn't do that. It just sits there. Ethereum sits there and pays you.

[00:09:11]Now, BMNR is building staking into its treasury model. That means ETH appreciates over time, hopefully significantly, and the treasury earns staking yield on top of that. That yield can be used to acquire more ETH, which grows NAV per share, which expands premium investors are willing to pay for. It's a compounding flywheel fly fly fly wheel.

[00:09:38]There you go.

[00:09:40]All right, let's talk about the financial structure and how it actually works because BMNR trades on public markets. You can trade the stock just like any other stock and it even has options. Now, if the stock trades at a premium to the value of the ETH on its balance sheet, which is exactly what happened with MicroStrategy, then BMNR can issue new shares at that premium price.

[00:10:04]Take that capital, buy more ETH, and now the treasury is bigger. NAV per share grows, the premium potentially expands further, issues more shares to buy more ETH, and on and on it continues.

[00:10:20]Okay, I'm not going to pretend that this is a risk-free trade because, I mean, is anything risk-free?

[00:10:26]No.

[00:10:27]Let's be clear about what you're taking on. Risk number one, the ETH price volatility. If Ethereum drops 60 to 70%, the NAV of the company drops with it.

[00:10:37]Crypto's volatile. That's really the deal. Number two, leverage. To the extent BMNR uses debt instruments to acquire ETH, leverage amplifies both on gains and losses. Now, if ETH tanks while there's leverage on the balance sheet, well, it could be kind of painful. And number three, regulatory uncertainty. Even with the Genius Act progressing, crypto regulation in the US can shift. New administration and SEC actions, international regulation, all of these can impact ETH and by extension BMNR. And number four, if there's a pre premium collapse. Now, treasury companies rely on trading at a premium to NAV. If sentiment shifts dramatically and BMNR starts trading at a discount to NAV, the entire engine breaks down. And then finally, execution risk. Management needs to execute the treasury model, the staking program, the capital raises, and the operating business simultaneously.

[00:11:42]And you know, that's not easy.

[00:11:45]Okay, let's talk real quick about the asymmetric setup that is available right now, and then I'll jump on the platform and I'll show you exactly how I'm trading it. Well, right now, Ethereum is beat up. BM and R is not widely known or understood. Tom Lee, one of the most credible voices in institutional finance, is betting real capital on this. I like that one, you know, he has skin in the game. Now, the macro tailwinds from stablecoins, AI agents, and institutional tokenization is you know, they're all building right now, and the genius act is moving forward at this stage. BlackRock is already on Ethereum. Robinhood is talking about tokenization publicly, and BM and R has a model, the Saylor playbook, and that has already been proven to 30X a stock.

[00:12:37]Now, if even a fraction of what's been being built on Ethereum plays out the way the smart money thinks it will, well, this is not a stock you look back and say, "I knew about it." It's a stock you either own or you don't. All right, guys, here we are on the tastytrade trading platform and brokerage, my favorite for trading options. And there's a link down below. If you go through my link, there's some benefits, and if you deposit at least a couple thousand dollars, I think it's $2,000, then uh that benefits me as well at no cost to you, so I really appreciate it.

[00:13:07]You need that at least to trade make a few trades anyway. So, here uh is BM and R on the platform, and you can see I've got one leaps option on in 756 days to expiration. So, what is that? That's like 2 years, right? Uh yeah, it's over for years. Now, I've got the 18. Right now, it's trading at 1945 and it's down eight you know, a little bit less than 1% on the day, but uh let's uh open up the trading play page and I'll show you exactly how this trade's made. So, I'm going to go out 756 days. Um So, 2 years on the leaps and what I've done is I've gone in the money 18. So, under the 1945. Calls are on the left, puts are on the right. And basically, what you do is you just go ahead and you click on the the ask, the buy on 18, boom. And then, the mid price is $10.10.

[00:14:04]So, for one da one option contract controls 100 shares of stock. So, you multiply that times 100, it's $1,010.

[00:14:13]That's also your max loss if it went to zero. Um and you could either do this or you could buy the stock outright. And uh the to buy it outright, it's $19.44.

[00:14:25]And if you bought 100 shares, it would be $1,944.

[00:14:29]So, for about half the cost, uh you can control the same 100 shares. So, that's why I like leaps options. Just like owning the shares outright, you can uh look, it increases in price uh just like owning the shares uh to the amount with the 77 delta. So, if the stock price goes up a dollar, this goes up 77 cents um the option contract. So, Uh I like to use leverage on these type of plays and then uh I go out 2 years and then once it gets about 1 year, then you know, at some point during that time, I typically, if there's a big run-up, I might close it out and then wait for a pullback again. So, that's kind of how I trade it. Now, one other thing that you can do, uh you know, I like the fact that BMN are uh it's easy to trade just like uh a stock or a fund and you can do it on it platforms. And you can also sell options against it.

[00:15:24]So, we of course we bought the option the long term. Now, you can sell short-term options against it. So, if we go out 56 days, I like to go 30 to 45 days where kind of right in the in between monthly cycles, but you can go out and what I typically like to do is let me see did I sell a call against it? I didn't. So, I'm going to go ahead and sell a call right now uh against it. I'm going to go out to July 56 days and hey, I can collect a dollar at the 23 strike a dollar 12. So, watch as soon as I hit this it's going to bring down the cost by a dollar. Boom. And it's 897. You hit review and send and place the trade. But, you know what? I've already got mine on. So, all I need to Yeah, I've got my leaps on. So, all I need to do is sell the call against it. So, I'm just going to sell a 23 call for a dollar 12.

[00:16:20]Boom. Dollar 13's mid price.

[00:16:24]So, I got to lower it a little. Look at all these trades and adjustments I made today in order to get filled. I'll just put it down to dollar 12. Wait, yeah. Dollar 12.

[00:16:36]And then I'm going to collect that $100.

[00:16:38]We're filled. All right, guys. Remember to hit the like and subscribe buttons down below. Join the free Discord in the pin comment down below. Free now, free for life. If you get in now, there will be a monthly charge. So, be sure and get in now and see all the trades and adjustments that I put on each and every day and be sure and watch this next video.