Thomas “Tom” Lee has been a regular on Wall Street for some time, and his recent turn toward cryptocurrencies indicates that he is not content to stay on the sidelines.
This feature is part of CoinDesk List of the most influential of 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 earned a reputation as a bullish and media-savvy stock strategist. Now, as Chairman of the Board of Directors of BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), Ethereum’s treasury, he plays a corporate role that puts him at the crossroads of traditional finance and digital asset innovation.
The strategist began his career in finance as a research associate at Kidder Peabody in the early 1990s. Lee also worked at Oppenheimer and Salomon Smith Barney, before joining Wall Street giant JPMorgan (JPM).
Lee was ranked among the top analysts for many years during his 15 years at the leading investment bank. In 2014 he left JPMorgan to co-found Fundstrat, where he was one of the first known strategists to provide cryptocurrency research coverage.
That experience now reinforces his new role at BitMine, which announced Lee’s appointment as president in June of this year. Along with Lee’s appointment, the company also announced that it had moved from its roots in bitcoin mining to a treasury 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 speak at CoinDesk’s upcoming Consensus Hong Kong in February and Consensus 2026 in Miami in May.
“Stablecoins have proven to be the ‘chatGPT’ of cryptocurrencies, 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 $250 billion today,” Lee said in a press release at the time. “Ethereum is the blockchain where most stablecoin payments are made and therefore ETH should benefit from this growth.”
BitMine has adopted “ETH per share” as a key performance metric, a nod to the playbook of other cryptocurrency treasury companies. Lee framed the strategy as part of the broader convergence of traditional finance and cryptocurrencies, highlighted by the burgeoning stablecoin market and Ethereum’s dominance in smart contracts and tokenized assets.
Lee recently said in a post on X that ether is “embarking on the same supercycle” that produced a 100x gain in bitcoin. since his 2017 client recommendation. He noted that BTC has suffered six drops of more than 50% and three of more than 75% in the last eight and a half years, arguing that the volatility reflects that markets are “discounting a huge future” and that investors have had to endure repeated “existential moments.”
He did not provide a timeline or price targets for his ether thesis, other than warning that the cryptocurrency’s upward path would not be in a straight line. The digital asset is down about 10% so far this year, despite two major code changes designed to improve blockchain implementation in 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 supply of the second-largest cryptocurrency. The digital asset treasury acquired 138,452 tokens last week, in its largest weekly acquisition in at least a month. It also increased its cash holdings to $1 billion and currently holds a total of $13.2 billion in cash and crypto assets.
Lee said the company had stepped up its cryptocurrency buying following the Fusaka upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain on December 3. The update is expected to increase performance, keep validators efficient, and strengthen the blockchain’s value capture by putting a floor on blob fees. If history is any guide, the upgrades do not reliably influence the price of ether, 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 tightening, 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 reducing operations after the Oct. 10 flash crash.
The Wall Street veteran is able to bridge the world of institutional investors with the crypto ecosystem. At Fundstrat, Lee earned a reputation for strong forecasting and transparent optimism, and is now translating that voice into corporate strategy and board governance.
The move to his new role at BitMine reflects the evolution of the crypto treasury model and shows that experienced traditional financial figures are increasingly willing to take on operational responsibility for digital asset exposures.
