Tom Lee used the stage at Hong Kong’s 3rd Futu Expo (March 13–14) to make a bullish, data-driven case that Ethereum may already be at — or very close to — a cyclical bottom.
What he argued
- Lee said Bitmine advisor and veteran market-timer Tom DeMark found a striking similarity between Ethereum’s recent price action and two major S&P 500 selloffs: the 1987 crash and the 2011 decline. According to DeMark’s mapping, Ethereum’s pattern shows a 93% correlation with the 1987 move and also lines up with the 2011 bottom.
- If the 1987 analog is the right model, Lee said ETH had already bottomed on March 7; if the 2011 analog is the better fit, the market is bottoming now. Either way, his takeaway: “we think we’re at the bottom or exiting the crypto winter now.”
On-chain evidence Lee highlighted
- He pointed to Ethereum’s realized price — an on-chain metric that approximates the average acquisition cost of coins based on when they last moved on-chain — which he said sits at $2,241.
- Using realized price as a baseline, Lee noted prior exhaustion levels: in 2022 ETH fell to a roughly 39% discount to realized price; in 2025 that discount reached about 21% before a rebound. “Currently, we’re at 22%,” he said, putting today’s drawdown in the same zone where last year’s reversal began. By that metric, the selloff could be reaching exhaustion.
Why it matters
- Lee’s argument blends chart analogs with on-chain cost-basis data to claim the market has reached the kind of holder “pain” that historically marks cycle lows — suggesting a bottom may not require a pristine macro backdrop or a new narrative cycle to form.
Long-term context
- Lee also reminded the audience of Ethereum’s decade-long outperformance: “In the last 10 years, Ethereum’s return is 49,000%,” he said — roughly 490x — and contrasted that with Bitcoin’s 11,000% and Nvidia’s ~65x over the same period.
Market snapshot
- At press time ETH traded at $2,147.
Lee’s thesis will likely invite debate: pattern-matching to past crashes and realized-price thresholds are popular but not definitive signals. Still, his presentation — pairing DeMark’s historical analogs with on-chain cost-basis data — gives bulls a clear framework to argue that the worst of the selloff may be behind Ethereum.
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