# Tom Lee - Crypto Spring Turning Into Full Blown Bull Market - TOKEN2049 Singapore 2026

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HnS4kP2gLNQ

[00:07] Hi.
[00:07] I've got uh 20 minutes to talk to you about uh something I think is very important, which is congratulations.
[00:17] Uh uh We are at the start of a crypto bull market.
[00:21] And uh if I had to give it a date, I'm going to say it was August.
[00:24] But you might be doubting if it's a crypto bull market because people think it's fragile, but that's exactly what happens at the start of a bull.
[00:32] So, let me walk you through my presentation.
[00:37] So, first, we are having a full-blown crypto bull market.
[00:41] There are too many signs that have happened that only happen in a bull market.
[00:47] Um so, let me start.
[00:49] The first is we have institutional backing.
[00:51] I mean, it's not just Franklin saying a bull market is starting, it's Fidelity, BlackRock, all the major players.
[00:59] I've never seen this in the past three cycles of crypto winters, never seen institutions declare
[01:07] this.
[01:09] We also have a technical argument.
[01:12] Bitcoin is above its 200-day moving average.
[01:15] [snorts]
[01:15] That happened on August 19th.
[01:18] Also on August 19th, Ethereum had a golden cross.
[01:21] But see, the last time Bitcoin crossed above its 200-day, that was August of last year, April of last year.
[01:29] [snorts]
[01:29] But since 2010, Bitcoin averages 80% positivity over the next 6 months, 200% gains.
[01:36] Ethereum averages 290%.
[01:42] Okay.
[01:44] Now, you can see this on a chart cuz I can make it simple.
[01:46] These are the other crosses above the 200-day.
[01:51] Out of the last nine crosses, eight were bull market starts.
[01:56] We also have positive ETF flows.
[01:59] You don't have positive flows into crypto in a bear market, only in bull markets.
[02:05] Only in bull markets for equities do you have positive flows.
[02:09] And then we have proof positive because crypto in the third quarter of this year, June to September, was the best performing macro asset by a country mile.
[02:19] The AI stocks were down in the quarter.
[02:24] [snorts]
[02:24] We had very terrible financial conditions.
[02:26] We had a hawkish Fed, surging oil, global bond yields going up, and tight financial conditions, yet crypto outperformed.
[02:36] That's what happens in a bull market.
[02:40] Crypto is ignoring the fact that basically the Fed's been hostile.
[02:45] And lastly, uh it's from coming from Tom DeMark.
[02:49] [snorts]
[02:49] He is the ex- one of our exclusive advisors for timing.
[02:52] He's saved Bitmain at least a hundred million dollars this year.
[02:55] He is worth his money in gold, and he says we are confident Ethereum will continue to trade higher.
[03:03] He thinks [clears throat] Ethereum should easily break 3,000 in the next few weeks.
[03:09] And lastly, I know it's a bull because
[03:12] the four-year cycle bottomed.
[03:14] So, if you set your clock, [snorts] the bottom was October 5th.
[03:16] So, we are two days past the bottom for crypto.
[03:19] So, in short, it's all in the math.
[03:24] Uh we are in a bull market.
[03:26] But here's the thing.
[03:28] This may be the biggest bull market uh we've ever seen, okay?
[03:33] So, I'm going to give you four reasons that this bull market is different than other bull markets, okay?
[03:41] So, as Joe Lubin says, you're not bullish enough.
[03:45] Okay.
[03:46] The first is there's a big institutional story around tokenization.
[03:53] In the bull market of 2016-2017, that was about ICOs.
[03:59] It was a retail story.
[04:01] 2029 or 2019 to 2021, that was an NFT boom, but that was a retail boom.
[04:08] Of course, some new tech and great tech came out of that.
[04:12] Last year, we had a stablecoin boom.
[04:14] That was cut short by that October 10th auto deleveraging event that wiped a lot of people out and started a huge crypto winter.
[04:22] But here we are.
[04:24] We have an institutional wave coming.
[04:26] BlackRock, asset managers beyond BlackRock, want to tokenize everything on blockchains.
[04:33] Vlad Tenev of Robinhood, who I think is going to end up being a top 10 financial institution within a decade, says, "We are the beginning of a supercycle.
[04:42] Everything running on traditional financial rails will be tokenized."
[04:48] That's a massive wave.
[04:48] How big is that wave?
[04:50] Well, crypto members are $2 trillion market.
[04:55] There's $200 trillion of liquid assets outside of crypto today, growing by $7 trillion a year.
[05:01] If you ever wonder if there's money to be building data centers, there's $7 trillion of new money every year.
[05:09] Just the top three markets alone is $160 trillion that can go into crypto.
[05:15] Remember, the ratio is 1 to 37.
[05:18] A trillion dollars going into crypto would turn it into a $37 trillion market.
[05:24] And of course, a lot of this is happening on Ethereum.
[05:27] BlackRock, JP Morgan, Robinhood, they're building on Ethereum.
[05:32] Ethereum, of course, has a massive community.
[05:36] The number of developers today is equal to the entire rest of the community combined.
[05:41] So, it's a massive wave.
[05:43] The second difference in this bull market [snorts] is there's a huge wealth transfer taking place.
[05:50] I don't think people have talked about this enough.
[05:53] But Vlad says it's a hundred trillion over the next 10 years.
[05:59] We can see this.
[06:01] This is from the IRS.
[06:01] In the last crypto bull market, okay?
[06:05] There was 400 billion dollars of inherited wealth.
[06:10] In the next cycle, it's probably close to one and a half to two trillion.
[06:14] This is a baby boomer
[06:17] Or older passing away, it's inherited by a millennial.
[06:21] That allocation goes from bonds to equities and crypto.
[06:24] Massive massive inflows.
[06:28] A lot of it's going to come out of private equity and private debt.
[06:31] At least 12 trillion.
[06:31] So, consider that a massive buying power.
[06:36] And of course, I think this is explaining why we're having a huge huge outperformance.
[06:40] I mean, staggering outperformance.
[06:43] The third thing that's happening this cycle that didn't happen in past cycles are the digital asset treasuries.
[06:54] You're wondering what role can they play?
[06:55] Well, foremost the Dats are the friend of crypto in a bull market.
[07:01] Okay?
[07:02] In this bear market, people wondered do Dats make sense?
[07:05] By the way, Bitmain is a digital asset treasury.
[07:09] And that's because in this bear market only four digital asset treasuries are trading above their net asset value.
[07:19] However, including Bitmain.
[07:21] But, in this next bull market I think all these Dats are going to recover.
[07:27] And they're going to start buying crypto.
[07:30] In a bull market, that means they're going to support the underlying blockchain.
[07:34] Why is that?
[07:36] Well, cuz they take out supply.
[07:39] [clears throat]
[07:40] The Ethereum Dats own 7% of crypto supply today.
[07:44] Bitcoin owns the Bitcoin dots own 6 and 1/2%.
[07:48] The Solana dots 3%.
[07:49] But look at hyper liquid.
[07:50] I mean, it's been a very successful chain and project, but part of it is the hyper liquid dot owns 14% of the supply.
[08:00] When you take out supply, take it out of the market, and then you have a bull market, guess what?
[08:04] The price is going to go up a lot more.
[08:07] And the Ethereum dots own the largest of the big three.
[08:14] 7% of the supply.
[08:16] That's that's not, you know, in the last bull
[08:20] Market, that didn't exist.
[08:20] That's why if you think about what's the upside for ETH, I think you're underestimating how much it can move.
[08:27] And lastly, there's a new story.
[08:32] You can see it out in this conference in the exhibitors, crypto is an important downstream AI story.
[08:41] So, AI is of course a mega trend.
[08:43] But everyone thinks it's just about semis and memory and bottlenecks, but that's not true.
[08:47] As the semis and the memory have corrected, the downstream stocks have outperformed.
[08:56] Mag 7, software, and crypto.
[09:00] Uh A16Z Mark Andreessen and there I know your next panel has someone from A16Z.
[09:06] They consider agentic payments the grand unification of AI and crypto because AI agents are going to carry money.
[09:16] They might carry a Visa card in their wallet, but most likely they're going to carry a crypto wallet.
[09:20] And we know
[09:23] Non-humans are becoming the dominant source of traffic.
[09:26] In fact, today they're also the largest consumers of crypto of compute tokens in AI.
[09:30] Is other agents.
[09:35] And we have to be careful because agents can now bypass captcha.
[09:37] We can't even tell who's who.
[09:42] So we going to need to keep humans in the loop.
[09:45] This is where crypto and finality and smart contracts and enforcement all come into play.
[09:53] So again, [clears throat] I don't think you're bullish enough.
[09:56] This is the biggest crypto cycle ahead.
[09:59] And I just want to emphasize that.
[10:02] So whatever you thought your upside would be or if you're doubtful we're in a cycle because you've sat through the last 12 months and it's been pretty tough.
[10:12] We can see it here.
[10:13] This conference has so much crypto energy.
[10:18] That was [snorts] also true at KBW last week and it's a big change from what we've been experiencing.
[10:24] So the last point I want to make is let's say that you're bullish on ETH and I think you should be.
[10:30] You should be bullish on the L1s.
[10:34] I had dinner uh in Taiwan recently with some of the people I met 10 years ago when I first started researching Bitcoin.
[10:43] So imagine 10 years ago Bitcoin was under a thousand.
[10:48] And Bitcoin's now 80,000 today.
[10:48] So these venture capitalists when I had dinner with them, I expected them to be like living in private jets because at a minimum if Bitcoin was an 80 times return, their ventures could be a hundred or a thousand times.
[11:07] But here's what they said.
[11:10] They said that their venture returns have been okay, but they wish they just bought Bitcoin.
[11:15] Okay.
[11:16] And that's what I'm telling you now.
[11:19] You want to have the maximum exposure to Bitcoin and Ethereum and even Solana in
[11:25] This cycle, I think the L1s are going to capture a lot of the value.
[11:31] But there is a way to outperform the L1, which is buying the digital asset treasury.
[11:35] And Bitmain is positioned to outperform this cycle.
[11:41] I want to make that point really clear.
[11:45] So, uh, here's three ways we're doing it.
[11:49] The first is Bitmain maintains the maximum exposure to Ethereum in this bull market cycle.
[11:57] Okay?
[11:59] Here's Ethereum's price.
[12:01] It's been consolidating for 5 years.
[12:04] You know, the longer the base, the bigger the breakout.
[12:08] The last time Ethereum consolidated, it had a 227x.
[12:13] And then the prior time to that, 54x.
[12:18] I think, given tokenization, AI, everything I talked about, the DATs and the wealth transfer,
[12:26] It's a 25x minimum.
[12:29] Okay?
[12:30] Well, what does that mean for Bitmain's share price?
[12:31] The stock is currently 26.
[12:36] And Bitmain is 90% correlated to Ethereum.
[12:41] Well, if Ethereum gets to 22,000, which I think's the low target, Bitmain's share price goes from 26 to 300 to 500.
[12:49] That's a massive move.
[12:53] Uh if Ethereum gets to 62,000, Bitmain's share price is 1,200 to 1,500.
[12:59] But, you can see we're really focused on making sure Bitmain's share price has maximum exposure to Ethereum.
[13:07] Okay?
[13:08] The second thing is, we wanted to get to 5% of the supply.
[13:14] That's a hard cap.
[13:16] We're not going to be accumulating past 5%.
[13:19] Okay?
[13:20] Because people don't want to think we're diluting shareholders, which we have not been.
[13:25] Okay?
[13:26] Because in our first year, look at all
[13:28] we of what we've accomplished.
[13:30] Bitmain's only been around for 15 months and already we we've broken ground, created a lot of firsts.
[13:37] But let me walk through few of them.
[13:40] The first is we reached 6 million ETH.
[13:43] That's 4.9% of the supply.
[13:47] I want to focus your eyes on the bottom.
[13:50] Bitmain is also been added to the Russell 1000 index.
[13:55] That's the US large cap index.
[13:58] There's only six crypto stocks in the Russell 1000.
[14:01] We're the only Ethereum play.
[14:07] That means when large institutions and hedge funds say they want to get crypto exposure, there's only one stock they're going to buy, which is Bitmain.
[14:16] But we said we have a 5% hard cap.
[14:21] We're not going to own more than 5% of Ethereum.
[14:23] That's something that Vitalik kind of asked us to do, to stop at five.
[14:28] Justin Drake, the foundation.
[14:31] We're going to stop at 5%.
[14:31] So, where do we sit relative to that 5%?
[14:37] Well, this is our accumulation of ETH over the past 15 months, okay?
[14:42] And you can see we're currently at 6 million.
[14:46] That took us little over a year.
[14:49] We thought this would take five years.
[14:50] It took us little over a year.
[14:53] More importantly, we did this all in the middle of a bear market, okay?
[14:58] So, we bought ETH while no one wanted to buy it.
[15:01] We were glad to buy it cheaply.
[15:03] We bought a lot at 1500.
[15:06] But it's in the middle of a bear market, and now we're going to stop.
[15:08] We only need to get another 100,000 ETH to get to 5%, okay?
[15:13] But we're going to stop there.
[15:17] The reason we're going to stop there is this chart.
[15:24] We did all this buying in a bear market.
[15:27] Okay?
[15:29] So, in fact, I kind of think we helped set a floor for ETH.
[15:32] We protected the downside for ETH because we were buying.
[15:34] But now, we're done stacking in front of a 25x move.
[15:42] So, if we have a 5% hard cap, that means we're going to outperform ETH on the way up, right?
[15:47] Cuz you don't have to worry about us trying to raise capital.
[15:51] We're done.
[15:54] Now, we're designed to outperform Ethereum.
[15:56] That's what we started the company to do, and I can show you that we've done that because last year, we started Bitmain on June 30th, and the from June 30th to December, Ethereum was up 22%.
[16:11] Bitmain gained 500%.
[16:14] 48,000 basis points of outperformance.
[16:18] This year, in a crypto bear market, Bitmain is up 3% while Ethereum's down 9%.
[16:26] We outperformed by 1,200 basis points in a bear market.
[16:31] And in total, you can see we delivered for shareholders, 40 or 53,000 500 basis points of outperformance.
[16:38] Now, keep in mind, there's a bull market starting.
[16:42] It's probably going to look a lot more like 2025.
[16:46] There's other things we've done.
[16:48] We bought back stock to protect shareholders.
[16:52] In fact, we did the largest crypto buyback ever in history.
[16:56] But here's what's interesting.
[16:57] This is Bitmain's share price this year.
[17:01] As you know, we employ Tom DeMark.
[17:04] We decided our stock got too cheap right here.
[17:07] [snorts]
[17:07] July 14th.
[17:07] We commenced our buybacks.
[17:10] We did it for about a month, spent $350 million.
[17:16] You You can see we helped protect the stock on the downside.
[17:19] And as soon as we stopped, by the way, the stock went up even more.
[17:23] That's what buybacks are supposed to do, protect shareholders.
[17:28] We also set a benchmark price for Ethereum credit.
[17:32] Okay?
[17:34] We issued BMNP, a perpetual preferred,
[17:37] at $80.
[17:39] It's gone straight to 99.
[17:42] In fact, today it's at 100.
[17:45] Okay?
[17:45] Here's the thing.
[17:47] It's a preferred stock.
[17:47] It's like a bond.
[17:49] Well, guess what?
[17:52] In this From the time we issued BMNP, long-term treasuries fell 8%.
[17:57] Investment-grade bonds fell six, high-yield bonds fell three.
[18:02] Our preferred went up 24%.
[18:02] We are even the best-performing bond in the world.
[18:08] Okay?
[18:08] If that doesn't tell you that a bond holders like owning BMNP, BMNR shareholders should be happy owning BMNR.
[18:19] And we have the lowest cost of funding.
[18:22] BMNP yields 9 and 1/2%.
[18:25] I think that's too high, but as you can see, compared to Bitcoin preferreds, which are around 12, and Solana preferreds, which are around
[18:33] 15. By the way, I like both of them.
[18:36] I'm a fan of Bitcoin and Solana.
[18:38] Crypto is not uh winner take only all.
[18:42] And lastly, we're going to leverage our scale.
[18:46] We have Maven.
[18:48] It's our staking operation.
[18:50] It's generating a million dollars a day in staking rewards.
[18:51] We have Eight Co.
[18:55] [snorts]
[18:55] It owns a big stake in Opening Eye.
[18:58] That stake has already jumped in value, and it owns the World token.
[19:02] And it's undervalued.
[19:03] And of course, we have a huge stake in Beast.
[19:06] And lastly, which I think is the next financial services company, but what I want to just leave you with is the big money not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.
[19:15] From the great Charlie Munger.
[19:18] He is the original hoddle, okay?
[19:21] So, just to conclude, this is the biggest crypto bull market and you're not bullish enough.
[19:25] Thank you.