Why Someone Is Promising $ETH at $62k in the Middle of a “Crypto Winter”
The market is knocked out, everyone is complaining about “another crypto winter”, and somewhere in Dubai Tom Lee is standing there with a perfectly straight face explaining how $ETH at $62k can solve your retirement problem. The picture is vivid enough that it’s worth unpacking it layer by layer to see what’s really going on.
First, the background. Lee is not an anonymous avatar on X. Behind him are Fundstrat, experience with ETFs, TV appearances and the chairman’s seat at Bitmine — a company that in just a few months has accumulated a hefty bag of $ETH and is now preaching to the world about a “supercycle” and a “1971 moment for Ethereum”. If you look at the numbers from past years, it really does look tempting: over ten years $ETH is up roughly 500×, bitcoin about 112×, and Nvidia with its 65× looks almost modest by comparison. Against that backdrop, the phrase “the best years are still ahead” doesn’t sound like a joke but like an invitation to the next stage of market addiction.
Breaking the Four-Year Cycle
Next, Lee carefully approaches crypto’s sacred cow — the four-year cycle. What the industry has been presenting for years as a “law of nature” (halving → pump → crash → rebirth), he puts under the microscope. He suggests looking at two metrics: the copper/gold ratio and the ISM business activity index. Historically, the copper/gold ratio would hit its peaks and bottoms roughly every four years and lined up quite well with risk cycles: copper up — industry is alive and growing; gold up — the world is scared again and runs for safety.
A similar pattern existed with ISM: U.S. manufacturing breathed in 3–4-year waves, and the index peaks matched bitcoin tops surprisingly well. Now things are different. Copper lives in a world of China, green energy and mega-construction projects, while gold lives in a world of wars, central banks and de-dollarization. ISM has been stuck below 50 for years and refuses to behave like a neat textbook sine wave. And if the macro pendulums themselves have stopped swinging in a four-year rhythm, it’s fair to ask: why should bitcoin keep following the old sсript?
A New Cycle: Tokenization as the Engine
At this point Lee smoothly moves us to the model that suits him: the old industrial cycle is breaking down, and the new one is being built around tokenization. First came stablecoins: the dollar was tokenized, people started earning on spreads and liquidity flows — that was the “ChatGPT moment” for Ethereum, when Wall Street suddenly realized that a blockchain is not a toy for shitcoins but a fee-generating conveyor belt.
Then Larry Fink enters the frame, calling tokenization “the most interesting development since double-entry bookkeeping” with a straight face and slapping the “next big market” label onto anything that can be written into a ledger.
But Lee doesn’t stop at basic “digitization of assets”. He sells tokenization 2.0: not just slicing a painting into a thousand tokens, but decomposing a business into factors. He suggests taking Tesla and splitting it into a bundle of packages: a token of future earnings for 2036, a token of robotaxi revenue, a token of the notional “Elon premium” as a factor. Mix prediction markets with on-chain rights. If this scheme starts working, the market stops buying some abstract “TSLA as a whole” and begins trading specific future cash flows — not on a spreadsheet, but in smart contracts.
What All of This Should Run On: The Ethereum Bet
The key question: what infrastructure is supposed to power all of this? Lee’s answer is as straightforward as it gets — Ethereum. He pulls out the 1971 analogy: back then the dollar was decoupled from gold, removing the brakes for derivatives, eurodollars and the rest of the circus. Now, in his logic, traditional assets are being “decoupled” from their old forms of ownership and moved onto a single programmable layer.
Tokenized bonds, funds, stable dollars, gold and a residential complex like “Sunny Pine Grove 3” as RWAs — all of it gradually ends up on the Ethereum stack. Most pilot projects for tokenizing real-world assets are indeed being built there, from JPM Coin to institutional experiments with Treasuries. The war for the smart-contract market has effectively been won by Ethereum, and the bitcoin maxis are grumbling from the sidelines.
$ETH at 12k, 22k and 62k: How Lee Draws His Levels
This is where the “tasty” part begins — price targets. On Lee’s slide there are three marks: 12k, 22k and 62k per $ETH. His math is almost honest: if bitcoin reaches $250k, then
$ETH_target ≈ BTC_target × ($ETH/BTC)
The base case is simply returning to the average historical $ETH/BTC ratio, which lands us around 12k. Pushing a bit higher, toward the highs of the previous cycle, gives roughly 22k. And if Ethereum really becomes the payment rails and collateral layer for a tokenized world, and the market starts assigning it a premium the way it once overpaid for high-growth stocks, then you get that 62k-per-coin picture. The important thing to understand: this is not a law of physics, it’s a slick infographic for grown-ups who enjoy lots of zeros.
Digital Treasuries and the Role of Bitmine
The final act is digital treasuries. Here Lee pulls out MicroStrategy and Bitmine as examples. MicroStrategy trades more dollar volume than JP Morgan; Bitmine trades more than General Electric, even though in terms of market cap it’s a dwarf next to them. Together these two companies account for roughly 92% of all volume in “public crypto treasuries”.
In other words, Wall Street has already voted with its wallet: if you want beta exposure to the crypto market via equities, you don’t go to some generic “crypto mutual funds”, you go to a couple of specific tickers that have captured the liquidity. In this pairing, Bitmine is the direct embodiment of Lee’s ideas: a $ETH-denominated treasury that aims not just to sit in the asset long term, but to position itself as core infrastructure.