Fundstrat’s Tom Lee, an investor, financial analyst, has made headlines with a bullish forecast on the next Ethereum move on CNBC this week. As a regular contributor, he appeared in the TV studio, predicting that the two biggest cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin and Ethereum, could surge within the next three months.
He expects the crypto market to make a “monster move” and Bitcoin and Ethereum to be the top profiteers of this. In a tweet published after the appearance on CNBC, Lee argued that by the middle of October, Ethereum may spike to $5,500.
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Ethereum to reach $5,500 in October, predicts Tom Lee
Tom Lee shared his outlook amid growing expectations that this week the Federal Reserve will announce its first interest rate slash in the past nine months at the upcoming FOMC meeting. Lee believes that such a rate cut will allow new liquidity to flow into financial markets, providing the starting conditions for the aforementioned “monster move” he expects Bitcoin and Ethereum to make over the next three months.
However, the size of the cut remains a mystery. While Fed’s chairman, Jerome Powell, hinted that 25 basis points would be shed. However, the community is guessing whether it will indeed be 25 bsp or 50 bsp. Either way, the market is bracing for a massive shift.
Lee is not only a renowned investor and financial analyst, but he is also the chairman of Bitmine, a company that has been going out of its way to accumulate Ethereum this year under Lee’s leadership. Bitmine’s ETH strategy mirrors Strategy’s aggressive Bitcoin bet but with a focus on Ethereum.
Ethereum to flip Bitcoin: Tom Lee and Nick Tomaino
The prediction Tom Lee made this year, along with Bitmine building its ETH treasury, clearly states that they expect Ethereum to flip Bitcoin during this market cycle and not only in terms of price growth but also in long-term utility and relevance. Lee faced a massive backlash for his prediction from the community as he sparked a hot debate between Bitcoin and Ethereum fans and investors.
Nick Tomaino, a former top Coinbase executive and the founder of the crypto investment firm 1confirmation, stands by Tom Lee and his forecast. In a recent X post, Tomaino argued that Ethereum’s role in powering financial applications in the future is likely to make it the flagship of crypto adoption. He opposed Ethereum to Bitcoin, saying that BTC is “digital gold,” with a market capitalization value of $2.3 trillion against Ethereum’s $500 billion market cap.
Per the former Coinbase exec, Bitcoin has been mostly adopted as a store of value with hardly any utility beyond that so far. He believes that Ethereum here surpasses it as it powers stablecoins, DeFi, NFTs, prediction markets, and the tokenization of real-world assets. Ethereum was the first blockchain platform to expand the utility of crypto, bridging traditional financial markets with the crypto space. Besides, Ethereum then became the launchpad for other L1 and L2 blockchain platforms and crypto exchanges, with Binance as the brightest example.
The former Coinbase executive added that every new decentralized app built on Ethereum not only brings in new users but also solidifies Ethereum’s role in the crypto market. He called ETH “the most scarce, credibly neutral digital asset on the planet.” Per him, the widespread use of ETH through multiple dapps makes it the cornerstone of the crypto economy, surpassing Bitcoin’s static role as a store of value. He concluded: “ETH will flip BTC.”
Tom Lee and Michael Saylor: “Bitcoin and Ethereum are friends”
Earlier this week, Tom Lee published a photo where he and Michael Saylor are standing together and smiling. “Bitcoin and Ethereum” are friends, the caption said, thus stressing the leadership positions of not only BTC and ETH, as Lee is bullish on both. While he expects ETH to hit $5,500, he believes that this year Bitcoin can surge to $250,000, sharing this prediction with Tim Draper, an early Tesla, SpaceX, and Skype investor.
Long-term crypto critic, Peter Schiff, commented on that X post, saying that these two cryptocurrencies are “partners in crime.” For a long time, Schiff criticized Bitcoin as a bubble that would burst sooner or later. Still, he tweets about BTC quite frequently, thus attracting thousands of BTC fans to his account.
Bitmine currently holds a total of 2,151,676 Ethereum worth nearly $10 billion. It has recently acquired 85,000 ETH. As for Saylor’s Strategy, this Monday, it announced yet another large Bitcoin acquisition: 525 Bitcoins for roughly $60.2 million at approximately $114,562 per BTC. As of September 14, the company holds 638,985 BTC worth $73,527,684,457.
Earlier this year, Ethereum reached a new all-time high, the first one since 2021, hitting $4,953. Bitcoin also surged to a new historic peak of $124,457.
