Tom Lee Says Ethereum Looks Ready To Exit Crypto Winter

Tom Lee used a Hong Kong conference stage to argue that Ethereum may be close to a cyclical turn, pointing to historical market analogs and on-chain cost-basis data that, in his view, suggest the selloff has reached exhaustion.

Speaking at the 3rd Futu Expo 2026 in Hong Kong on March 13–14, Lee said Bitmine advisor Tom DeMark had identified a striking resemblance between Ethereum’s recent price action 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 comparison 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 comparison is the better fit, 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 did not leave the case resting on chart symmetry alone. Lee also pointed to Ethereum’s realized price, the on-chain metric that estimates the average acquisition cost of coins based on their last movement on the blockchain. In his telling, that figure now sits at $2,241 for ETH, giving investors a way to judge how deeply underwater the average holder has become.

Lee said the pattern at prior lows is revealing. In 2022, Ethereum fell to a 39% discount to realized price. In 2025, the discount reached 21% before ETH turned higher. “Currently, we’re at 22%,” he said, adding that the market is now sitting in roughly the same zone where last year’s reversal began. “So we’re at the level where in 2025, Ethereum started to turn higher.”

In other words, Lee’s thesis is that Ethereum does not need a pristine macro backdrop or a fresh narrative cycle to stabilize; it only needs to revisit the kind of holder pain that has historically marked exhaustion. By his measure, that threshold is already here.

He also tried to zoom out from the immediate 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 times investors’ money.

At press time, ETH traded at $2,147.