Thomas “Tom” Lee has been a fixture on Wall Street for some time, and his recent move into crypto indicates he’s not content to stay on the sidelines.
This feature is part of CoinDesk 2025 Most Influential List.
Lee co-founded Fundstrat Global Advisors, an independent financial research firm, in 2014. He is currently head of research at Fundstrat and FSInsight, and chief investment officer at asset management firm Fundstrat Capital. Today, as Chairman of the Board of BitMine Immersion Technologies (BMNR), Ethereum’s treasury, he occupies 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 associate at Kidder Peabody in the early 1990s. Lee also worked at Oppenheimer and Salomon Smith Barney, before later joining Wall Street giant JPMorgan (JPM).
Lee was ranked among the 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 high-profile strategists to cover cryptocurrency research.
This 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 Hong Kong Consensus 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. U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent recently said the stablecoin market could reasonably grow to $2 trillion from 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 and so ETH should benefit from this growth.”
BitMine has adopted “ETH per share” as its key performance metric, a nod to the playbook of other crypto treasury companies. Lee framed the strategy as part of a 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 an article on X that ether is “going into the same supercycle” that produced a 100x gain in bitcoin. since his client recommendation in 2017. He noted that BTC has suffered six declines of more than 50% and three of more than 75% over the past eight and a half years, arguing that the volatility reflects the fact that markets are “anticipating a massive future” and that investors have had to endure repeated “existential moments.”
He did not provide a timetable or price targets for his ether thesis, only warning that the cryptocurrency’s rise would not be in a straight line. The digital asset is down about 10% year to date, despite two major code changes intended to improve blockchain deployment in 2025.
BitMine is currently the largest company holding ether. The company has a stack of around 3.9 million tokens, more than 3% of the supply of the second-largest cryptocurrency. The digital asset treasury company acquired 138,452 tokens last week, marking its largest weekly acquisition in at least a month. It also increased its liquidity to $1 billion and currently holds a total of $13.2 billion in crypto assets and cash.
Lee said the company ramped up its crypto purchases following the Fusaka upgrade of the Ethereum blockchain on December 3. The upgrade is expected to increase throughput, maintain validator efficiency, and strengthen blockchain value capture by putting a floor on blob fees. If history is any guide, the updates do not reliably influence the price of Ether, but they do strengthen the network’s institutional advantage.
He cited macroeconomic factors, including an expected Federal Reserve rate cut 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’s reduction in operations after the October 10 flash crash.
The Wall Street veteran is capable of connecting the world of institutional investors to the crypto ecosystem. At Fundstrat, Lee built a reputation for strong forecasts and transparent optimism. He now translates that voice into corporate strategy and board governance.
The move to his new role at BitMine reflects the evolving crypto-treasury model and shows that seasoned figures in traditional finance are increasingly willing to take operational responsibility for digital asset exposures.
