Ethereum at Amazon/Nvidia-Like Inflection Point, Tom Lee Forecasts $12,000 ETH

Tom Lee, Chairman of Bitmine Immersion Technologies (the world’s largest corporate holder of Ethereum), is strongly pushing an “$ETH 2.0 thesis.” In it, he says Ethereum ($ETH) is at an inflection point similar to Amazon before AWS or Nvidia before the AI boom.

Ethereum enters “$ETH 2.0 era” amid Wall Street and AI adoption

In a recent commentary titled “$ETH is the Cure for the Uncanny Valley of Wealth,” Lee argued that at present $ETH is “grossly undervalued” because retailers are “rage-quitting at the bottom.” At press time, $ETH was trading at $1,844, down 46.97% in the past year and 63% below its August 2025 all-time high of $4,953.

Source: CoinMarketCap

Nonetheless, multi-billion-dollar companies’ tokenized products such as BlackRock’s BUIDL and JPMorgan’s MONY are proof that institutions are building on Ethereum’s long-term future.

Even more, large firms such as Bitmine are running the network as validators even after the Ethereum Foundation scaled back its footprint to just 0.1% of $ETH’s circulating supply.

He further supports Ethereum’s bullish case by noting that its security and immutability position it at the forefront of agentic use in artificial intelligence (AI). He further projects that Ether will evolve from a speculative coin into a payment rail for automated computational power.

$ETH price targets

In the short term, Lee predicts $ETH could hit $2,200 by August this year. In the long term, the project targets $12,000 if Bitcoin hits $250,000. This would be driven by a rotation of capital from Bitcoin and an improvement in the current 0.029 $ETH/BTC exchange ratio.

He adds that $ETH could further rise to $65,000 should it dominate as a global payments network and settlement layer for tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Further out, he sets a $5 trillion market cap, implying a $250,000 multi-year target.