Tom Lee’s Bold Prediction: Ethereum Primed to Overtake Bitcoin - Here’s the Timeline

Ethereum's coming for Bitcoin's throne—and one top analyst says the flip could happen sooner than anyone expects.

The Scalability Advantage

While Bitcoin remains digital gold, Ethereum's smart contract capabilities create an entire ecosystem that Bitcoin simply can't match. The network effect is building—developers, applications, and institutional interest all converging on the more versatile platform.

The Adoption Tipping Point

Major financial institutions are quietly building on Ethereum's infrastructure while treating Bitcoin as a digital commodity. That divergence in utility could trigger the valuation shift that cryptocurrency traditionalists have been dismissing for years.

Market Dynamics at Play

Ethereum's active address count continues climbing while transaction volume consistently challenges Bitcoin's dominance. The metrics don't lie—the momentum is building toward a fundamental repricing of the entire crypto hierarchy.

Of course, Wall Street analysts have made wrong predictions before—remember when they said blockchain would revolutionize banking by 2020? Still, this time feels different. The infrastructure is here, the developers are building, and the market might just be ready for a new king of crypto.

Will Ethereum Flip Bitcoin?

Wood set the premise with ARK’s top-down view of crypto’s addressable market by decade’s end. “You know, the ecosystem we expect to hit $25 trillion in 2030, the vast majority of that in Bitcoin,” she said, citing Bitcoin’s role as “a global monetary system, you know, rules based that we’ve been missing since the US went off the gold exchange standard in 1971.” She asked Lee directly: “I’d love to hear your thoughts on why ETH or the ecosystem will surpass Bitcoin.”

Lee’s answer was to rewind to that same inflection point. “1971 was when Nixon formally withdrew the US from the gold standard. The immediate beneficiary was there was demand and a market to own gold,” he said.

But in his telling, the more consequential development was how finance rebuilt itself around an unpegged dollar. “In 1971, the dollar became fully synthetic because it was no longer backed by anything. And so there was a risk that the world WOULD go off the dollar standard. So Wall Street stepped in create products to propagate the future of Wall Street, including…money market funds…credit…mortgage backed securities…futures, et cetera.” He continued, “Dollar dominance by the end of that period…went from 27 percent of GDP terms…to 57 percent of central bank reserves and 80 percent of financial transaction quotes.”

For Lee, the market-structure consequence was stark: “The market cap of equities today is 40 trillion compared to two trillion for gold. So in other words, gold is 5 percent of all available assets.” He then drew the crypto corollary. “In 2025, we think everything is now becoming synthetic as we tokenize…as we move not just dollars onto the blockchain, just stablecoins, but we’ll move stocks and real estate. Dollar dominance is going to be the opportunity of Ethereum. So digital gold is Bitcoin. And so in that world, we believe Ethereum could flip Bitcoin, similar to how Wall Street and equities flipped gold post ’71.”

Crucially, Lee couched the flippening as a sectoral dynamic rather than a zero-sum bet. “That is just our working theory because I am still a Bitcoin bull,” he said. “I’m very bullish on Bitcoin and I believe [Ark Invest’s] targets for Bitcoin are actually reachable. So we think Bitcoin’s fair value should at least be $1.5 to $2.1 million, but we can see higher values.”

TOM LEE EXPLAINED TO CATHIE WOOD WHY ETHEREUM $ETH WILL EVENTUALLY FLIP bitcoin $BTC!pic.twitter.com/uFpoWWyHYY

— Tom Lee Updates (Not Tom) (@TomLeeUpdates) October 16, 2025

In his framework, Bitcoin anchors the “digital gold” monetary premium, while Ethereum’s neutral smart-contract platform becomes the venue “where a lot of Wall Street will innovate” through real-world-asset issuance and collateral flows. “That would, of course, provide upside to a neutral smart contract platform where a lot of Wall Street will innovate real world assets,” he concluded.

At press time, ETH traded at $3,750.