Tom Lee sees a possible crypto-market bottom ahead
BlockBeats reported on Sept. 8 that Bitmine Chairman Tom Lee expects the crypto market’s four-year cycle to bottom in the coming weeks.
As the third quarter of 2026 entered its final month, ETH was the best-performing macro asset through last Friday. It outperformed the S&P 500 by 5,430 basis points, or 54.3 percentage points. Since June 30, the three best-performing assets were ETH, BTC and SOL.
Lee said crypto assets had delivered significant outperformance against other macro assets so far in the third quarter. In his view, that performance has laid the groundwork for institutional investors to increase their crypto holdings.
CLARITY Act vote and South Korean buying
Lee identified several potential positive catalysts for the final months of 2026. One is a vote on the CLARITY Act, which is expected to take place in mid-September.
He also said South Korean investors had resumed buying crypto assets after moving from AI stocks into the crypto market. Lee expects the four-year cycle to reach a bottom in the coming weeks.
According to Lee, these factors could create conditions for institutional investors to make large-scale crypto purchases during the final months of 2026. He said tokenization and the development of agentic AI would be particularly important to that participation.
Tokenization and agentic AI may support ETH/BTC
Lee said the ETH/BTC ratio typically rises during crypto bull-market cycles because Ethereum’s usage continues to increase relative to Bitcoin.
He cited different narratives behind earlier cycles: IC0 from 2017 to 2018, NFTs from 2020 to 2021, and stablecoins in 2025.
For the coming crypto-market cycle, Lee expects the ETH/BTC exchange rate to continue rising. He pointed to Wall Street’s tokenization of assets on blockchains and the use of blockchains by agentic AI as the drivers.