Fundstrat's Tom Lee believes Ethereum's prolonged price weakness reflects impatient investors rather than deteriorating fundamentals. In a November 10 post on X, Lee acknowledged that ETH's sluggish performance was disappointing but largely attributed it to market impatience, according to the source.
Tokenization and AI
Lee pointed to steady and visible progress toward a tokenization supercycle in 2026, with the "vast majority" of it happening on Ethereum, as a reason to stay patient. He also pushed back on the idea that AI was "consuming all incremental capital" that might otherwise have flowed into crypto.
His optimism also drew on Vitalik Buterin's discussion of ETH as a store of value. At the recently concluded Devcon 8 event in Mumbai, the Ethereum co-founder declared: "I've finally made my mind up, ETH is a store of value, ETH is money." Buterin also questioned whether fee burning provides a reliable basis for valuing the asset, arguing that the model depends on assumptions the network's historical activity did not consistently meet.
According to Lee, Buterin's declaration represents a "seismic shift" that will clarify how the token captures value in the coming cycle, in which tokenization and artificial intelligence will feature greatly. He said the developments are reasons for Ethereum holders to be optimistic, especially since the "crypto bull market just started."
ETH Price and Bitmine Holdings
CoinGecko data at the time of writing showed ETH trading near $2,100, down by less than 1% in 24 hours but recording bigger dips of 6% and 14% across one and two weeks, respectively. Over the last 30 days, the cryptocurrency lost almost 16% of its value and was nearly 42% lower than a year ago.
Meanwhile, Bitmine, where Lee serves as chairman, recently bought an additional 9,587 ETH to bring its holdings to over 6 million tokens, just under 5% of the total supply. The company reported that 5.2 million of those coins were staked, although its seven-day staking yield fell to 2.65% from 3.03% a week earlier.
