Tom Lee Says Ethereum Looks Ready To Exit Crypto | Crypto News
Tom Lee used a Hong Kong convention stage to argue that Ethereum could also be close to a cyclical flip, pointing to historic market analogs and on-chain cost-basis data that, in his view, counsel the selloff has reached exhaustion.
Speaking at the third Futu Expo 2026 in Hong Kong on March 13–14, Lee said Bitmine advisor Tom DeMark had recognized a hanging resemblance between Ethereum’s latest price motion and two major S&P 500 declines: the 1987 crash and the 2011 selloff. Lee described the setup as unusually tight.
Is The Ethereum Bottom In?
“Tom DeMark, he’s a legendary market timer, and he’s provided an analysis to us that says Ethereum, in the last few months, especially since October, is really mirroring what happened to the S&P 500 in 2011 and what happened to the S&P 500 in 1987,” Lee said. “If you were involved in US markets, both times marked major declines in the S&P. Well, according to him, there’s a 93% correlation to what Ethereum’s doing today to what the S&P did in 1987.”
That comparability is doing a lot of work in Lee’s argument. If the 1987 analog holds, he said, Ethereum would have already bottomed on March 7. If the 2011 comparability is the better match, the market is bottoming now. In either case, Lee’s conclusion was the same: “So using his analysis, we think we’re at the bottom or exiting the crypto winter now.”
He didn’t go away the case resting on chart symmetry alone. Lee also pointed to Ethereum’s realized price, the on-chain metric that estimates the average acquisition price of cash based on their last motion on the blockchain. In his telling, that determine now sits at $2,241 for ETH, giving traders a approach to choose how deeply underwater the average holder has turn into.
Lee said the sample at prior lows is revealing. In 2022, Ethereum fell to a 39% low cost to realized price. In 2025, the low cost reached 21% before ETH turned greater. “Currently, we’re at 22%,” he said, including that the market is now sitting in roughly the same zone where last 12 months’s reversal started. “So we’re at the level where in 2025, Ethereum started to turn higher.”
In other phrases, Lee’s thesis is that Ethereum doesn’t need a pristine macro backdrop or a recent narrative cycle to stabilize; it only wants to revisit the sort of holder pain that has traditionally marked exhaustion. By his measure, that threshold is already right here.
He also tried to zoom out from the quick drawdown and re-anchor ETH in a longer time horizon. “Before you lose any hope, keep in mind that over the last 10 years, Ethereum has outperformed every other asset class over the past decade,” Lee said. “In the last 10 years, Ethereum’s return is 49,000%. That means almost 490 times your money.”
Lee contrasted that with Bitcoin’s 11,000% gain over the same span and even with Nvidia, which he called “the single best stock in the US,” saying it had returned 65 occasions traders’ money.
At press time, ETH traded at $2,147.
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