Via fool.com
The Fundstrat co-founder argues that autonomous machines will need a trust-minimized settlement layer, and Ethereum is the obvious candidate.
Tom Lee has never been one to whisper his market calls. The Fundstrat co-founder and chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies used a keynote at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris to lay out what might be his most ambitious thesis yet: Ethereum is the backbone of the coming machine economy, and it could see a 50x increase from current levels.
His price target for ETH sits at $250,000. That’s the kind of number that makes even hardened crypto bulls double-check their hearing.
The machine economy thesis #
Lee’s argument rests on a straightforward observation about where the internet is heading. During his June 2026 remarks, he stated that “robots are already going to dominate most traffic on the internet.” If autonomous AI agents are going to transact with each other at scale, they’ll need a payment rail that doesn’t require a human compliance officer approving every wire transfer.
That’s where Ethereum fits in, according to Lee. Traditional banking infrastructure was built for humans filling out forms and waiting three to five business days. Smart contracts running on a proof-of-stake blockchain can settle transactions in seconds, verify identity programmatically, and operate around the clock without anyone clocking out for lunch.
Lee also tied his thesis to the tokenization of real-world assets, a trend that has been gaining traction with major financial institutions over the past two years. If trillions of dollars in traditional assets migrate onto blockchain rails, the settlement layer processing those transactions captures enormous value. Lee believes Ethereum is best positioned to be that layer.
The numbers backing the narrative #
Lee isn’t just talking theory. He pointed to a striking data point from July 21, 2026: ETH surged 24% while the Roundhill Memory ETF, which tracks AI-adjacent semiconductor and memory stocks, dropped 38%. That’s a 62-percentage-point divergence between two assets that investors often lump into the same “bet on AI” category.
Lee is also putting corporate money where his mouth is. BitMine, the company he chairs, has been accumulating ETH through multi-million-dollar purchases. That’s not a casual endorsement. When a public company’s treasury strategy aligns with its chairman’s conference keynotes, the conviction is real, or at least expensive enough to be taken seriously.
Why Ethereum over competitors #
Part of the answer is network effects. Ethereum still hosts the largest ecosystem of developers, decentralized applications, and DeFi liquidity. For AI agents that need to interact with a wide variety of smart contracts and tokenized assets, going where the infrastructure already exists matters more than chasing marginally faster block times on a chain with a fraction of the ecosystem.
Ethereum’s proof-of-stake consensus mechanism also plays into Lee’s thesis. A settlement layer for autonomous machines needs to be energy-efficient and economically sustainable. The shift from proof-of-work, completed in September 2022, addressed one of the biggest criticisms lobbed at Ethereum’s viability as global financial infrastructure.
Wall Street firms exploring tokenization have overwhelmingly gravitated toward Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem. If Lee’s prediction about a supercycle driven by institutional tokenization proves correct, Ethereum’s first-mover advantage in attracting traditional finance participants could compound over time.
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