BitMine's Tom Lee Sees Ethereum (ETH) Above $10,000

Ethereum's Next Narrative: Tokenization and AI

Ethereum (ETH) has entered a new upcycle, according to BitMine Immersion Technologies chairman Tom Lee, who said in a podcast interview published Aug. 24 that the prolonged bear market is over and that tokenization, followed by artificial intelligence, will drive the next wave of demand. Lee argued that roughly 90% of digital-asset price movements are determined by macro conditions rather than project-specific narratives, a framing he says explains much of Ethereum's recent relative weakness. He described the phase as “crypto spring” and said Ethereum can climb past $5,000 in this cycle, with $10,000-plus becoming plausible once Wall Street asset tokenization and AI demand scale, a move that would mark a new all-time high for Ethereum. He views the tokenization market as far larger than stablecoins and said most real-world asset work is already taking place on Ethereum and Solana. BitMine, he added, has reached about 97% of its goal to accumulate 5% of the total ether supply; the remaining amount was worth roughly $350 million at interview time. The firm slowed weekly purchases after more than 60 weeks to avoid appearing overly centralized, and it has no plans to sell, treating Ethereum as a yield-bearing store of value. Lee also cited the CLARITY Act's regulatory progress as a factor that could shape the buying timetable, with ether trading near $2,500 at the interview.

In an infrastructure update, Arbitrum said it can now generate zero-knowledge proofs for mainnet blocks using Succinct Labs' SP1 virtual machine, a step that moves the Optimistic rollup toward ZK settlement. The project detailed the milestone in an official post on X, adding that the same proof pipeline covers Stylus contracts written in C++ and Rust through Arbitrum's AltVM framework, not just Solidity. A dedicated Rust validator has also been integrated into BOLD, the protocol's dispute-resolution system, giving Arbitrum a way to verify settlement with a different client implementation. Arbitrum currently relies on an optimistic model in which transactions are treated as valid unless challenged within a time window; generating a succinct proof would let it settle with cryptographic certainty instead of assuming a fraud-proof challenge will catch errors. The announcement does not mean the fraud-proof framework is being abandoned, but it illustrates how major Layer 2s are converging on hybrid designs that blend optimistic and zero-knowledge mechanics. For the Ethereum ecosystem, the progress matters because Layer 2 finality is one of the main bottlenecks when users move value back to the main chain.

Retail access to Ethereum is shifting as well. Webull chief executive Anthony Denier said buy-side orders for Bitcoin and ether jumped nearly 300% over the past week and a half after the repeal of the U.S. pattern day trading rule, which took effect June 4. In a televised interview, Denier said the removal of the $25,000 account threshold opened frequent same-day trading to most of Webull's customer base, where the average account holds roughly $5,500. He linked the rule change to revenue rising from $160 million in Q1 to near $200 million in Q2, largely on the strength of one month. Only a small share of Webull clients actively day trade Bitcoin and ether, he said, and that group is below the roughly 10% of users who day trade across all products. Most customers hold long-term positions and trade actively during volatile stretches. Denier added that Webull has yet to record a quarter with falling client assets under management, a sign the platform's move into unrestricted crypto trading has broadened engagement rather than simply accelerating churn. For Ethereum, the order-book jump is a reminder that rule changes can quickly reshape the retail demand profile.

Taken together, the three updates show Ethereum being repriced from both the risk side and the infrastructure side. BitMine's accumulation toward a 5% supply target and Webull's order data point to supply absorption, while Arbitrum's official update delivers a concrete efficiency milestone. The primary source matters there: Arbitrum's own post confirms SP1 now produces zero-knowledge proofs for mainnet blocks and that a Rust validator has been folded into BOLD — a working engineering result, not a proposal. What is not yet clear is when these proofs will be used in production settlement. Our reading is that the breadth of demand — an institution adding ether weekly and a retail broker seeing near-300% order growth — is the most durable signal.