When Tom Lee lists the bullish tool, he draws the function of the Ethereum token
Ethereum's growing role in institutional finance took center stage at CNBC's Power Lunch this week, with Tom Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat Global Advisors, saying that Ethereum could climb to $7,000-$9,000 by early 2026 as Wall Street accelerates efforts to virtualize assets and move financial activity on-chain.
According to Lee, Ether's (ETH) investment case is increasingly tied to its use as a financial infrastructure, as Wall Street experiments with onchain settlements and tokenized securities.
“Wall Street wants to tokenize everything,” Lee says, pointing to the initiative at Robinhood and BlackRock. The transition, he said, could bring efficiency to traditional finance by eliminating real-world use cases on Ether. He added that Ether could eventually reach $20,000 as adoption deepens.
He was also bullish on Bitcoin (BTC), calling it a “real store of value” and next year's $200,000 to $200,000 “makes a lot of sense,” framing the recent underperformance against gold as temporary.
Lee is the chairman of BitMine Immersion Technologies, a leading ether-based treasury company that reported holdings of 4,066,062 ETH, according to CoinGecko data.
Related: 70% of Ether positions are ‘long' as whale stocks boost ETH supply
The Ethereum blockchain controls tokenized RWA
Real-world assets represented by onchain, traditional financial instruments, and physical assets represented by onchain are expanding rapidly this year, with the total market value growing from about $5.6 billion at the beginning of 2025 to about $18.9 billion.
According to data from RWA.xyz, US Treasury debt is the largest tokenized asset class at around $8.5 billion, followed by commodities at around $3.4 billion.
Ethereum currently holds the majority of RWA value in public blockchains. By the end of December 2025, the network will host more than $12 billion in alternative assets, ahead of alternatives like BNB Chain, Solana and Arbittrum.
Ethereum leads the release of stablecoins on the network with nearly $170 billion.
Institutional interest in tokenized RWAs continues to build in December when the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation (DTCC) announced plans to virtualize the U.S. Treasury securities portion of the Depository Trust Company's branch of the Canton Network.
DTCC operates the post-trade infrastructure for the U.S. securities markets, with its partners handling about $3.7 quadrillion in securities transactions last year.
Magazine: Attacking Quantum Bitcoin Is A Waste Of Time: Kevin O'Leary
