Tom Lee Says Buy Bitcoin as Ether Targets $22,000
Tom Lee said investors should buy bitcoin in 2017 when it traded near $2,600. Now the Fundstrat Global Advisors founder and Bitmine chairman says Ether could reach $22,000 within the next few years.
The move rests on a bigger target: Lee’s $250,000 Bitcoin call, which he says leaves Ether with room to climb to $62,000 to $250,000 over the long term. For crypto holders, the message is blunt — Lee is still betting on the same adoption thesis, only with Ether now at the center of it.
Lee’s 2017 Bitcoin call
$20,000 to $50,000 was Lee’s 2017 Bitcoin target when the token traded at about $2,600. Bitcoin reached $20,000 just a few months later, and it now trades at about $64,000, giving his earlier call a track record that helps explain why traders still listen when he shifts to a new coin.
Late 2024 was the turning point for that shift. Lee, who was initially less bullish on Ethereum, began recommending it and later called Ether’s pullback over the past year a “bloodbath buying opportunity.”
Bitmine holds 5.54 million Ether
5.54 million Ether tokens sit on Bitmine’s balance sheet, equal to 4.6% of its circulating supply. Lee had the company build its own Ethereum Treasury after being appointed chairman last June, making Bitmine the world’s largest corporate holder of Ethereum and giving his bullish case a visible backing in assets, not just commentary.
50% is how far Ether has fallen since the last day of 2024. That drop is the friction point in Lee’s thesis: he is arguing for a far higher valuation while the token still trades well below where it started the year, forcing buyers to weigh conviction against a deep drawdown.
Ethereum’s 2022 Merge
2022 was the year Ethereum transitioned to proof-of-stake in The Merge, a network upgrade that ended mining and added support for smart contracts and staking. By late 2025, Ethereum had nearly 32,000 active developers, the largest blockchain-based developer ecosystem, and Lee is tying that base to his case for institutional adoption, stablecoins, and tokenized real-world assets.
$22,000 is Lee’s near-term Ether target, and he says the longer-term range runs from $62,000 to $250,000. He also says autonomous AI genetics will need public, neutral, and secure blockchains like Ethereum for identity authentication, validation, and instant machine-to-machine payments, which makes the next move a test of whether institutions accept that role fast enough to matter in price.
