Tom Lee is back with another big call for crypto, and this time he is pointing Wall Street toward Ethereum. The founder of Fundstrat Global Advisors and chairman of Bitmine said Ether could reach $22,000 within the next few years and climb as high as $62,000 to $250,000 over the long term.
That kind of forecast is why people are searching buy bitcoin again instead of looking only at Ether. Lee built his reputation by telling investors to buy Bitcoin in 2017, when it traded at about $2,600, and by saying it could reach $20,000 to $50,000 by 2022. Bitcoin hit $20,000 just a few months later and now trades at about $64,000, giving Lee a record that still carries weight with traders looking for the next move.
Lee is not treating Ethereum as a side bet. He began recommending it in late 2024, and after being appointed Bitmine's chairman last June, he had the company build its own Ethereum Treasury. Bitmine now holds 5.54 million Ether tokens, equal to 4.6% of Ether's circulating supply, making it the world's largest corporate holder of Ethereum.
The numbers behind the latest call are stark. Ether has fallen about 50% since the last day of 2024, even as Lee argues that the pullback is a bloodbath buying opportunity. The high end of his forecast would imply a gain of 14,870% from current levels, a scale that puts the asset in a different category from the usual crypto trade.
Lee's case rests on how Ethereum has changed since The Merge in 2022. The network moved from PoW to PoS, Ether could no longer be mined, and Ethereum gained support for smart contracts and staking. It also became the largest blockchain-based developer ecosystem, with nearly 32,000 active developers by late 2025, which is the base Lee points to when he talks about future value.
He also sees the network getting better over time rather than standing still. Ethereum's Layer-1 is still slower than newer PoS blockchains like Solana, but Layer-2 rollups already bundle multiple transactions and process them off-chain at higher speeds. Over the next decade, The Verge, The Purge and The Splurge are meant to improve scalability, reduce congestion and gas fees, and make the network more efficient. That is the path Lee is betting on when he puts a $22,000 target in front of investors and leaves the door open to much higher prices later.
The unresolved question is not whether Lee is bullish. It is what level of adoption, activity or institutional demand would be enough to turn a forecast that extreme into something the market can actually price in.
