BitMine chairman Tom Lee has pinned Ethereum’s long-run upside to an explicit ratio framework and a “replacement-cost” lens on global payment rails. In his September 2 “Chairman’s Message,” the Fundstrat co-founder centers the analysis on the ETH/BTC cross and a year-end Bitcoin anchor of $250,000, using a slide-based grid to translate ratio levels into ETH spot targets—and then extends the calculus to a $62,500 scenario if Wall Street’s settlement stack migrates to Ethereum.
He then walks through the core exhibit. “So, let’s think about what that means for price. I have a grid here. On the left side is Bitcoin price levels and then going across are various levels of the Ethereum to Bitcoin ratio. Our year-end target—this is from the Fundstrat side—for Bitcoin is $250,000. And if you look at the average, okay, then you can see the range of prices for Ethereum using this ratio and different levels of Bitcoin. And here’s the 2021 high. And as you can see, at a $250,000 Bitcoin, you get to somewhere between $12,000 and $22,000 value per Ethereum token.”
Beyond the grid, Lee argues that Ethereum captures the greatest share of tokenized financial activity and that its proof-of-stake economics align with how regulated institutions pay for security and uptime today. In his telling, banks and market operators already fund siloed infrastructure stacks; staking ETH to secure common rails could substitute that spend while returning a native yield, an incentive he says pushes the ETH/BTC ratio higher as risk capital and cash flows migrate.
This is also where the “replacement-cost” view feeds into the $62,500 outcome: if Ethereum becomes the settlement substrate for payment networks, tokenized credit and equity, and AI-linked data rights, the market should price ETH on the value of the rails it replaces rather than only on historical multiples or cycle heuristics.
The message also situates BitMine’s corporate blueprint inside that macro arc. Lee describes BitMine as an Ethereum treasury business built to compound ETH per share through five levers—equity issued above NAV, equity-linked volatility monetization, operating cash flows, staking rewards, and M&A for treasuries near NAV—arguing that proof-of-stake turns an ETH balance sheet into an income-producing infrastructure asset.
At press time, ETH traded at $4,377.
