Tom Lee: "Crypto Bull Underway - This Cycle Likely The Largest" | Bitmine Chairman's Message — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:02Hi there, this is Tom Lee. I'm the
2. 0:04chairman of Bitmain immersion
3. 0:05technology.
4. 0:06And this is our chairman's message for
5. 0:08the month of October 2026.
6. 0:11The title of my presentation is the
7. 0:13crypto bull market is underway
8. 0:15and the cycle is likely to be the
9. 0:17largest. There's a few things I want to
10. 0:19cover. The first is explain to you why a
11. 0:21full-blown crypto bull market is
12. 0:22underway.
13. 0:24Foremost, we have institutions like
14. 0:26Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and others
15. 0:28saying that a crypto bull market is
16. 0:30underway. That's never happened in any
17. 0:32of the past cycles.
18. 0:35Another thing to note is Bitcoin moved
19. 0:37above the 200-day moving average on
20. 0:38August 19th.
21. 0:40That last happened August 24th, 2025,
22. 0:43and as you can see on this chart,
23. 0:45Bitcoin made a huge move to over
24. 0:47100,000.
25. 0:49In fact, since 2010,
26. 0:51whenever Bitcoin is above its 200-day
27. 0:53moving average,
28. 0:54the 6-month forward return averages 193%
29. 0:58with a positive win ratio 80%.
30. 1:00That's pretty powerful odds.
31. 1:02And since 2012, for instance, there have
32. 1:05been nine crosses above the 200-day
33. 1:07moving average.
34. 1:08Eight of the nine were bull market
35. 1:11flags.
36. 1:12The flows into Bitcoin ETFs also turned
37. 1:14positive year-to-date. That won't happen
38. 1:17in a bear market.
39. 1:18And look at performance.
40. 1:21In the third quarter,
41. 1:23crypto crushed other macro assets by a
42. 1:25country mile. Ethereum
43. 1:27outperformed the S&P by 6,500 basis
44. 1:30points.
45. 1:31Keep in mind, this came in the midst of
46. 1:32a hawkish Fed, surging oil prices,
47. 1:35global bond yields rising, and
48. 1:36tightening financial conditions. So, the
49. 1:38outperformance of crypto in the face of
50. 1:40all that is a sign of a bull market.
51. 1:43And Tom DeMark, the exclusive advisor to
52. 1:45Bitmain, says we're confident that
53. 1:47Ethereum markets will continue to trade
54. 1:48higher. When a market rallies 100% off
55. 1:51the low, it's often an indication of a
56. 1:53potential trend reversal.
57. 1:56And lastly, keep in mind October 5th is
58. 1:59the cycle bottom of the four-year
59. 2:01cycle, meaning the bear market for
60. 2:04Bitcoin ended and a bull market is
61. 2:05starting. So, as you can see, it's all
62. 2:07maths.
63. 2:09Now, we think this crypto bull market
64. 2:10should be larger than the past cycles.
65. 2:12Basically, the biggest bull market we've
66. 2:14ever seen.
67. 2:15And I'll give you some reasons. The
68. 2:17first is tokenization.
69. 2:19In our view, tokenization is a far
70. 2:20bigger driver than other bull markets.
71. 2:23In 2016-2017, it was an ICO boom,
72. 2:26primarily retail.
73. 2:28In the 2019 to 2021 era, it was the
74. 2:30NFTs, primarily retail.
75. 2:33Last year was a stablecoin
76. 2:35boom, but it got cut short because of
77. 2:37the October 10th massive debt
78. 2:39deleveraging {slash} auto deleveraging
79. 2:41event.
80. 2:43But, it's different now. BlackRock wants
81. 2:45to put
82. 2:46most of its assets on as tokenized
83. 2:49assets.
84. 2:50Robinhood Vlad Tenev says we're at the
85. 2:53beginning of a supercycle. In fact, he
86. 2:54thinks everything that runs on
87. 2:56traditional rails will eventually become
88. 2:57on-chain {slash} tokenized.
89. 3:00And it's a huge addressable market.
90. 3:02Total liquid assets globally is around
91. 3:05200 trillion,
92. 3:06but just the top three, stocks, bonds,
93. 3:09and credit, would be 160 trillion.
94. 3:12For every dollar that's been tokenized
95. 3:14or TVL'd on an L1 blockchain, it creates
96. 3:17about $1 value for the blockchain. So,
97. 3:19if 10% moves on-chain,
98. 3:22that creates a $16 trillion market.
99. 3:25And of course, as you can see, a lot of
100. 3:27this is being built on Ethereum, whether
101. 3:28it's BlackRock, JP Morgan, even
102. 3:30Robinhood.
103. 3:32And Ethereum benefits from the deepest
104. 3:34community,
105. 3:35more developers combined than every
106. 3:37other blockchain.
107. 3:39So, this is the tokenization wave. It's
108. 3:41institutional, unlike the prior waves.
109. 3:44Second, there's a wealth transfer
110. 3:46element here.
111. 3:47Vlad Tenev recently mentioned there's a
112. 3:49$100 trillion dollar wealth transfer
113. 3:51underway, and I think many investors
114. 3:52don't realize it's already happening.
115. 3:55For instance, in just the last 3 years,
116. 3:56look at that, over a trillion and a half
117. 3:58dollars
118. 3:59uh has been inherited by
119. 4:01someone who's passed away, probably
120. 4:04someone who's a baby boomer,
121. 4:06to someone who's a millennial or a Gen
122. 4:07X.
123. 4:09And that, of course, changes the mix of
124. 4:10what they own.
125. 4:12In the crypto bull market of 2019-2021,
126. 4:16there was some inheritance, but it was a
127. 4:18small effect, about 450 billion dollars.
128. 4:21But look at this upcoming bull market.
129. 4:23There may be as much as 1 and 1/2 to 2
130. 4:25trillion dollars being inherited.
131. 4:27Again, a pronounced allocation away from
132. 4:30credit towards digital assets and
133. 4:33equities.
134. 4:34I think a lot of this allocation comes
135. 4:35from private equity and private credit,
136. 4:37which are going to face tremendous
137. 4:38headwinds as yields have risen.
138. 4:41And keep in mind, there's institutional
139. 4:43FOMO because of crypto was the
140. 4:44best-performing macro asset in the midst
141. 4:46of financial conditions tightening.
142. 4:49Imagine what will happen in the fourth
143. 4:50quarter, again, as a bull market is
144. 4:52starting.
145. 4:53The DApps are going to contribute to a
146. 4:55larger bull market as well. DApps are a
147. 4:57friend in a bull market. Although a lot
148. 4:59of people question the role of DApps,
149. 5:01especially because only four DApps trade
150. 5:03above NAV, including Bitmain.
151. 5:05These other DApps will recover in the
152. 5:07bull market. So, think about that.
153. 5:09They're going to be absorbing supply.
154. 5:12So, in a bull, the DApps support the
155. 5:13L1s. For instance,
156. 5:15Ethereum DApps combined own 21 billion
157. 5:18dollars of Ethereum.
158. 5:20That's 7% less of the network available.
159. 5:23And in other bull markets, there wasn't
160. 5:25this entity that absorbed that much
161. 5:27supply.
162. 5:28So, guess what? If demand's recovering
163. 5:30and supply has shrunk, we should expect
164. 5:32big price moves.
165. 5:34And keep in mind, crypto is an AI
166. 5:36downstream story. We've talked about the
167. 5:38sport, but as memory and chips
168. 5:40corrected, the Mag 7 software and crypto
169. 5:42should gain, and that's exactly how it's
170. 5:43played out. And we know why.
171. 5:46Agents are going to carry digital
172. 5:48wallets and they're a rising share of
173. 5:50all traffic and of course we have to
174. 5:52worry about their capabilities.
175. 5:54We have to keep humans in the loop
176. 5:56and of course that's why crypto plays a
177. 5:58role.
178. 5:59And that takes us to Bitmain.
179. 6:01We think it's really well positioned to
180. 6:02outperform this cycle.
181. 6:05So the first thing the company is doing
182. 6:06is maximizing its exposure to ETH in
183. 6:08this bull market.
184. 6:11Ethereum has been range bound for the
185. 6:13last 5 years.
186. 6:15But it broke out of those ranges in the
187. 6:16past.
188. 6:18A 227X move in 2016,
189. 6:21a 54X move in 2019-2020,
190. 6:25and with tokenization and agentic AI,
191. 6:28could this be a 25X move? Probably.
192. 6:32And look at what happens with Bitmain's
193. 6:34share price.
194. 6:36Bitmain is 90% correlated to the move in
195. 6:38ETH.
196. 6:40So if ETH gets to 22,000,
197. 6:42that's 300 to 500 for Bitmain shares. If
198. 6:45ETH gets to 62,000,
199. 6:47that's 1200 to 1500 dollars per share.
200. 6:50And Bitmain's currently at 26.
201. 6:53Bitmain is also reaching our 5% target
202. 6:56of Ethereum supply because that
203. 6:58optimizes shareholder value.
204. 7:01The company accomplished a lot in its
205. 7:02first year of operations, but notably we
206. 7:05reached almost 6 million ETH
207. 7:07and we're pretty close to our 5% target.
208. 7:10Here's the progress we made since June
209. 7:1330th of last year and you can see it
210. 7:14took 15 months to get to 6 million ETH.
211. 7:17And that all happened in the middle of a
212. 7:18bear market. So we need to get about
213. 7:21100,000 more ETH and that's about it.
214. 7:24Here's the thing.
215. 7:25All that accumulation took place in this
216. 7:27bear market here.
217. 7:28And now we're done stacking while a bull
218. 7:31market is starting.
219. 7:32So
220. 7:34if we're done stacking but ETH goes up a
221. 7:35lot, you can imagine that we'll
222. 7:37outperform Ethereum.
223. 7:39And that's track the price of
224. 7:41treasuries, but they should outperform
225. 7:42and that's what we've done.
226. 7:44Bitmain outperformed in 2025 by 48,000
227. 7:48basis points versus Ethereum. Think
228. 7:51about that. From June 30th to December
229. 7:5331, Ethereum was up 22%
230. 7:56Bitmain was up 500% and in 2026 in the
231. 7:59middle of a bear market, Bitmain was up
232. 8:013%
233. 8:03while Ethereum's down nine.
234. 8:05And in total, 53,500 basis points of
235. 8:08outperformance since inception. I'd say
236. 8:10we're clearly outperforming ETH.
237. 8:12One of the reasons we did that is we
238. 8:13executed the largest crypto buyback
239. 8:15ever.
240. 8:17On July 14th
241. 8:19Bitmain began a stock buyback, which was
242. 8:22pretty much at the lows.
243. 8:24Then we bought back 21 million shares,
244. 8:26the largest crypto buyback ever, $350
245. 8:28million, and we completed that on August
246. 8:3117th, but as you can see, that helped
247. 8:33establish the low for Bitmain stock
248. 8:35price.
249. 8:36And we issued an ETH credit. And I don't
250. 8:38know if you've really appreciate how
251. 8:40much it's outperformed. We issued this
252. 8:43at $80 a share on June 2026 and it's
253. 8:46currently $99.
254. 8:48So pretty substantial outperformance,
255. 8:50but consider this.
256. 8:52It's been in the middle of a big bond
257. 8:54bear market.
258. 8:56Treasuries are down 8% in that same time
259. 8:58frame. Investment grade down six, high
260. 9:00yield down three.
261. 9:01And yet Bitmain has gained 24% on price.
262. 9:05That is pretty substantial
263. 9:06outperformance as credit. And as you can
264. 9:08see, the cost of debt for Bitmain's
265. 9:11perpetual preferreds
266. 9:13or the cost of funds really
267. 9:15is 9.56%. It's much lower than that of a
268. 9:18Bitcoin or a Solana treasury.
269. 9:21And lastly we want to leverage our
270. 9:23substantial scale to optimize
271. 9:24opportunities in both tokenization and
272. 9:27the Ethereum ecosystem.
273. 9:29Foremost is Maven. It's the largest
274. 9:31single staking operator in the world
275. 9:32managing $2 billion of other people's
276. 9:34crypto.
277. 9:36But as you can see, this is allowing us
278. 9:37to also generate substantial staking
279. 9:39rewards of about a million dollars per
280. 9:41day.
281. 9:42And we have our moonshot in 8 co. It's
282. 9:45the largest holder of World tokens.
283. 9:48That's the crypto project from
284. 9:50founded by Sam Altman.
285. 9:52But, it owns a big stake in OpenAI. And
286. 9:54you can see uh similar companies are
287. 9:56trading at six times NAV.
288. 9:59I do think 8 co is a great investment
289. 10:01for us.
290. 10:02We're also the largest corporate
291. 10:04shareholder in Beast Industries.
292. 10:06Mr. Beast owns and acquired Step
293. 10:09Financial. We believe they're going to
294. 10:11be creating a financial services empire
295. 10:14that is the Gen Z, Gen Alpha for
296. 10:16Robinhood, Chime, and SoFi. And we've
297. 10:18led the found the investment in the
298. 10:20Ethereum Foundation spin-offs.
299. 10:23Eth Labs, Ethereum Institutional, and
300. 10:25Eth Systems. We're the lead investor, of
301. 10:27course. We all want to support the
302. 10:29ecosystem.
303. 10:30So, in conclusion, the big money is not
304. 10:33in the buying and selling, but in the
305. 10:34waiting, according to Charlie Munger.
306. 10:36He is the original hoddle.
307. 10:39And of course, this is coming at a time
308. 10:40when we may have the largest crypto bull
309. 10:42market ever. Thanks for listening, and
310. 10:45I'll speak to you soon.