Thomas “Tom” Lee has been a fixture on Wall Street for some time, and his latest pivot in crypto signals, he’s not content to remain on the sidelines.
This feature is part of CoinDesk’s The list of most influential 2025.
Lee co-founded Fundstrat Global Advisors, an independent financial research firm, in 2014. He currently serves as Head of Research at Fundstrat and FSInsight and as Chief Investment Officer at asset management firm Fundstrat Capital. Over the past two decades, he has built a reputation as a bullish, media-savvy equity strategist. Now, as Chairman of Ethereum Treasury BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), he is in a corporate role that places him at the intersection of traditional finance and digital asset innovation.
The strategist began his career in finance as a research assistant at Kidder Peabody in the early nineties. Lee also worked at Oppenheimer and Salomon Smith Barney before later joining Wall Street giant JPMorgan ( JPM ).
Lee was ranked among top analysts for many years during his 15-year tenure at the leading investment bank. In 2014, he left JPMorgan to co-found Fundstrat, where he was one of the first well-known strategists to provide research coverage for cryptocurrencies.
That experience now bolsters his new role at BitMine, which announced Lee’s appointment as chairman in June this year. Alongside Lee’s appointment, the company also announced that it had shifted from its roots in bitcoin mining to a financial strategy focused on staking and holding ether as its primary reserve asset. The company launched a $250 million private placement to implement the new strategy.
Tom Lee will be speaking at CoinDesk’s upcoming Consensus Hong Kong in February and Consensus 2026 in Miami in May.
“Stablecoins have proven to be the ‘chatGPT’ of crypto, leading to rapid adoption by consumers, merchants and financial services. US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently stated that the stablecoin market could reasonably reach $2 trillion compared to the current $250 billion,” Lee said in a press release at the time. “Ethereum is the blockchain where the majority of stablecoin payments are made, so ETH should benefit from this growth.”
BitMine has adopted “ETH per share” as a key performance metric, a nod to the playbook of other crypto-finance companies. Lee framed the strategy as part of the broader convergence of traditional finance and crypto, highlighted by the booming stablecoin market and Ethereum’s dominance in smart contracts and tokenized assets.
Lee recently said in a post on X that ether is “beginning the same super cycle” that produced a 100x gain in bitcoin since his 2017 client recommendation. He noted that BTC has suffered six moves of more than 50% and three of more than 75% over the past eight and a half years, arguing that the volatility reflects markets “discounting a massive future” and that investors have had to endure repeated “existential moments.”
He did not provide a timeline or price target for his ether thesis, other than warning that the cryptocurrency’s path higher would not be in a straight line. The digital asset is down about 10% year-to-date, despite two major code changes designed to improve blockchain rollout by 2025.
BitMine is currently the largest corporate holder of ether. The company has a stack of around 3.9 million tokens, or more than 3% of the second largest cryptocurrency’s supply. The digital asset treasury acquired 138,452 tokens last week, in its biggest weekly acquisition in at least a month. It also increased its cash holdings to $1 billion and currently has a total of $13.2 billion in crypto and cash assets.
Lee said the firm had stepped up its buying of the crypto following the Ethereum blockchain’s Fusaka upgrade on Dec. 3. The upgrade is expected to boost throughput, keep validators efficient and strengthen blockchain’s value capture by putting a floor on blob fees. If history is any guide, updates don’t reliably move ether’s price, but they reinforce the network’s institutional advantage.
He cited macro factors, including an expected rate cut by the Federal Reserve this month, and the end of quantitative easing, as catalysts for a stronger ether market in early 2026. Lee attributed the recent weakness in crypto markets to a sharp drop in liquidity, which may have been caused by a market maker shrinking operations after Oct.
The Wall Street veteran is able to bridge the world of institutional investors with the crypto ecosystem. At Fundstrat, Lee built a reputation for strong forecasting and transparent bullishness, now he translates that voice into corporate strategy and board leadership.
The move to his new role at BitMine reflects the evolution of the crypto-treasury model and shows that experienced traditional finance figures are increasingly willing to take operational responsibility for digital asset exposures.
