Tom Lee used a Hong Kong convention stage to argue that Ethereum could also be near a cyclical flip, pointing to historic market analogs and on-chain cost-basis information that, in his view, counsel the selloff has reached exhaustion.
Speaking on the third Futu Expo 2026 in Hong Kong on March 13–14, Lee stated Bitmine advisor Tom DeMark had recognized a placing resemblance between Ethereum’s current worth motion and two main 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 stated. “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.”
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That comparability is doing quite a lot of work in Lee’s argument. If the 1987 analog holds, he stated, Ethereum would have already bottomed on March 7. If the 2011 comparability is the higher match, the market is bottoming now. In both case, Lee’s conclusion was the identical: “So using his analysis, we think we’re at the bottom or exiting the crypto winter now.”
He didn’t depart the case resting on chart symmetry alone. Lee additionally pointed to Ethereum’s realized worth, the on-chain metric that estimates the common acquisition value of cash based mostly on their final motion on the blockchain. In his telling, that determine now sits at $2,241 for ETH, giving buyers a technique to decide how deeply underwater the common holder has turn out to be.
Lee stated the sample at prior lows is revealing. In 2022, Ethereum fell to a 39% low cost to realized price. In 2025, the low cost reached 21% earlier than ETH turned greater. “Currently, we’re at 22%,” he stated, including that the market is now sitting in roughly the identical zone the place final yr’s reversal started. “So we’re at the level where in 2025, Ethereum started to turn higher.”
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In different phrases, Lee’s thesis is that Ethereum doesn’t want a pristine macro backdrop or a recent narrative cycle to stabilize; it solely must revisit the type of holder ache that has traditionally marked exhaustion. By his measure, that threshold is already right here.
TOM LEE:
THE ETHEREUM BOTTOM IS IN ‼️Bitmine x TOM DEMARK mapped ETH in opposition to previous S&P 500 crash recoveries.
The construction now intently matches 1987 and 2011, each main cycle bottoms.
🔹 93% correlation to 1987
🔹 Match to 2011 backside
🔹 Realized worth: $2,241
🔹 ETH ~22%… pic.twitter.com/62TZscjChe— BMNR Bullz (@BMNRBullz) March 19, 2026
He additionally tried to zoom out from the fast drawdown and re-anchor ETH in an extended 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 stated. “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% achieve over the identical span and even with Nvidia, which he known as “the single best stock in the US,” saying it had returned 65 occasions buyers’ cash.
At press time, ETH traded at $2,147.
Featured picture created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
