Tom Lee (톰 리), chairman of BitMine, said Ethereum is near a bottom and could grow again over the long term in an “ETH 2.0” phase. CoinPost reported on July 13 that he set out the backdrop to the recent crypto market weakness, a scenario for an Ethereum rebound and BitMine’s strategy to secure ETH in a special keynote speech at WebX 2026.

Lee cited four factors that weighed on the crypto market this year. He said expectations for rate cuts earlier in the year weakened as the U.S. Federal Reserve shifted its monetary policy, and he said legislative uncertainty over the U.S. “Clarity Act” also remained. He also said new fundraising for crypto projects became difficult as venture investment money flowed into AI, and he pointed to weak financial stocks as another burden on the crypto market, which is seen as an alternative to existing financial infrastructure. He said, however, that much of the downside momentum had been exhausted.

On the near-term trend, he mentioned the possibility of a technical rebound. Citing Tom DeMark’s analysis, he said Ethereum’s current moves show a high correlation of 89.81 percent with the 1987 S&P 500, and that the sideways pattern after a sharp drop was also similar. Steve Sattmeier also set $2,200 as the next target if it breaks above the $1,846 to $1,876 resistance zone on July 9. ETH was in the $1,700 range at the time of the lecture.

Lee put more weight on Ethereum’s “Chapter 2” than on a short-term rebound. He argued that a new growth phase could open after a long stagnation, as with Amazon, Nvidia and JPMorgan. He said Ethereum rose as high as $4,866 through the ICO and NFT boom and recovered to $4,955 in 2025 on the back of ETF approval and the spread of stablecoins, but is now hovering around $1,732.

He presented four pillars of ETH 2.0 as a new foundation structure, agentic AI, finance’s payment layer and “ETH is money.” He also cited BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, JPMorgan’s MONY program, tokenisation cases involving Securitize and Ondo Finance, Robinhood’s Arbitrum-based Layer 2 chain, Coinbase’s Base and Kraken’s Ink, stressing broader adoption by Wall Street and large platforms.

He also put weight on the relationship between AI and blockchain. He warned that control and trust issues could grow if AI enters a stage where it creates more wealth than humans. He argued that smart contracts and blockchain could be a better line of defence than governments or banks, or Meta, Google and OpenAI.

He also disclosed BitMine’s business status. BitMine marked the first anniversary of its operations on June 30, 2025, and said it achieved 95 percent of its goal of securing 5 percent of ETH supply in 12 months, a target it had expected would take 5 years. It holds 5.74 million ETH, or about 4.8 percent of total supply, and about 85 percent of that, or 4.87 million ETH, is staked. He said the company is cautious about exceeding a 5 percent share held by a single entity and wants the ecosystem as a whole to strengthen.