One Wall Street voice is telling Bitcoin (BTC +3.65%) holders that its price will end the year near $250,000, and Ethereum (ETH +4.13%) holders that its price will be in the ballpark of $12,000. From today’s prices for these assets, near $63,000 and $1,800 respectively, that’s a bit hard to believe.
That voice is Tom Lee, Fundstrat co-founder, former J.P. Morgan chief equity strategist, and, since June 2025, chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, the owner of the largest corporate Ethereum treasury. Let’s dig into his predictions about these two coins and assess whether they’re likely to come true.
Image source: Getty Images.
Bitcoin probably won’t hit the target
Lee last reiterated his 2026 price target of $200,000 to $250,000 per Bitcoin on CNBC in January. He argued that the four-year halving cycle that governs the coin’s price is breaking down, and that spot exchange-traded fund (ETF) demand is now the dominant determinant of its price.
His rationale is that October 2025’s flash crash, which coincided with Bitcoin’s most recent all-time high of around $126,000, reset the market’s positioning, and also that a bull run for gold (like what’s happened over the last couple of years) has historically been a phenomenon that preceded big Bitcoin growth. Lee’s position in August 2025 was for Bitcoin to be above $200,000 by the end of the year, but that didn’t happen.
Today’s Change
(3.65%) $2,335.03
Current Price
$66,230.00
Key Data Points
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$63895.00 – $66274.00
52wk Range
$57945.16 – $126079.89
Volume
31.6B
Most of the institutional estimates for Bitcoin’s price are a lot closer to today’s prices than to those ceilings. Standard Chartered has cut its 2026 Bitcoin target from $300,000 to $100,000 across two revisions since December, citing weaker corporate buying and outflows from spot Bitcoin ETFs. More troubling for Lee, Fundstrat’s own internal 2026 outlook, written by strategist Sean Farrell, coached its clients to expect a pullback to the $60,000 area, which has largely played out.
Ethereum isn’t about to multiply in value either
Evangelizing a high price target for Ether while managing its biggest institutional Ether buy program isn’t an accident.
Lee’s Ethereum price target is nuanced in that it’s calibrated into several possible tiers, which are based on the ETH-to-BTC ratio.
His $12,000 floor assumes Ether returning to its eight-year average ratio against Bitcoin at his $250,000 BTC target. The $22,000 target, in contrast, assumes the ETH/BTC ratios seen during the peak of the 2021 bull market‘s levels. The highest (and most unrealistic) target of $62,000 in the near term assumes a ratio to Bitcoin that the token has never approached under any conditions.
Today’s Change
(4.13%) $76.79
Current Price
$1,938.15
Key Data Points
Market Cap
Day’s Range
$1855.27 – $1946.42
52wk Range
$1512.07 – $4946.05
Volume
10.8B
At a Paris conference in June, Lee also proposed $250,000 per Ether over the long term, driven by massive tokenization inflows of real-world assets like stocks and bonds, and by artificial intelligence agents handling their workloads on Ethereum.
Nonetheless, there are a couple of problems with Lee’s price targets. Ethereum at $62,000 per coin implies a $7.5 trillion market cap, and historically, only global reserve currencies can achieve such market caps. Even the $12,000 target is problematic, both on account of the market cap it’d require, and because it assumes an improbably high price for Bitcoin happening at the same time.
Lee’s day job at BitMine, meanwhile, is buying Ethereum at an industrial scale. The company already holds close to 5% of circulating supply, so the public target and the corporate buy program feed each other’s flywheel.
For most people, the most salient near-term target is Ethereum reclaiming its August 2025 all-time high of about $4,950. That probably won’t happen this year, but if a crypto bull market returns and the macro backdrop becomes slightly more permissive, it might be possible in 2027.
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