Fundstrat co-founder Tom Lee has set a $250,000 price target for Ethereum, arguing the network will become the settlement layer for a coming economy run by autonomous AI agents and robots. He points to a July divergence between ETH and an AI-focused ETF, plus ongoing purchases by BitMine Immersion Technologies, as early evidence for the thesis.
Tom Lee, the Fundstrat co-founder and chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, told a keynote at the Proof of Talk conference in Paris that Ethereum could see a 50x increase from current levels, putting his price target for ETH at $250,000.
The machine economy thesis
Lee's argument centers on where internet traffic is heading. In June 2026 remarks, according to Fundstrat's Tom Lee: "robots are already going to dominate most traffic on the internet." If autonomous AI agents are going to transact with each other at scale, he argues, they need a payment rail that does not require a human compliance officer approving every transfer.
That is where Ethereum fits in, according to Lee. Traditional banking infrastructure was built for humans filling out forms and waiting three to five business days, whereas smart contracts running on a proof-of-stake blockchain can settle transactions in seconds and verify identity programmatically. Lee also ties 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, and believes Ethereum is best positioned to be the settlement layer for that migration.
A data point from July
Lee points to a specific divergence: on July 21, 2026, ETH surged 24% while the Roundhill Memory ETF, which tracks AI-adjacent semiconductor and memory stocks, dropped 38% — a 62-percentage-point gap between two assets often grouped together as AI bets.
He is also backing the thesis with corporate money. BitMine, the company he chairs, has been accumulating ETH through multi-million-dollar purchases, aligning its treasury strategy with his public remarks.
Why Ethereum over rivals
Part of Lee's case rests on network effects: Ethereum still hosts the largest ecosystem of developers, decentralized applications, and DeFi liquidity, which matters for AI agents needing to interact with a wide range of smart contracts. Ethereum's proof-of-stake consensus, completed in a shift from proof-of-work in September 2022, also addressed one of the biggest criticisms of the network's viability as global financial infrastructure.
Wall Street firms exploring tokenization have overwhelmingly gravitated toward Ethereum and its Layer 2 ecosystem, according to Lee. If his prediction about an institutional tokenization supercycle proves correct, he argues, Ethereum's early lead in attracting traditional finance participants could compound over time.
Source: Crypto Briefing
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