Tom Lee Says Crypto Investors Are 'Rage Quitting' After Mark Cuban Dumped All His Bitcoin

• Tom Lee said on Monday that the current crypto slump fuels ‘rage quitting,”, agreeing that crypto has been “disappointing,” in part.
• Lee stated that the Bitcoin and Ethereum thesis is “absolutely not” broken and called the two “the future of money.”
• He said that his valuation of cryptocurrencies depended on the network usage and performance in comparison to gold.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee said on Monday that the recent slump in crypto has triggered “rage quitting” among investors in response to Mark Cuban’s reported decision to sell off his Bitcoin (BTC) holdings.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) Chairman Lee, speaking on CNBC’s SquawkBox, partly agreed when asked about Cuban, who sold all his Bitcoin on the argument that it had failed to act as an inflation hedge and that gold had proven the better bet. 

“I think Mark is right, crypto has been disappointing, because crypto should move with, you know, equity markets, and it should be rallying with software,” Lee said. “Software has really started to rally big, and crypto hasn't moved. So, I think there are what I call quote rage quitting people selling here as if something is wrong.”

Lee described the selling as a classic market bottom, saying it is “what always happens at the end of crypto winter.”  

The Bitcoin And Ethereum Thesis Is 'Absolutely Not' Broken

Lee said he believes the long-term case for the two largest cryptocurrencies is still intact despite the weakness. When asked if the thesis for Bitcoin or Ethereum (ETH) had been broken, he said it was “absolutely not,” stating that Bitcoin and Ethereum “are really the future of money because mass and compute or compute and energy, however Elon puts it, really are what’s scarce.”

He attributed this to the growth of artificial intelligence (AI), saying that as AI systems evolve to manage commerce and run websites."You need decentralized identity and verification. That's really what crypto does,” Lee stated. 

He added that the push toward tokenization on Wall Street is “a huge improvement in efficiency of actually how money moves,” saying it will ultimately benefit Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other smart-contract platforms.

Ethereum’s price was trading at $1,981, while Bitcoin’s price was trading at $72,146, both down over 2% in the last 24 hours. On Stocktwits, both Bitcoin and Ethereum were among the top trending cryptocurrencies at the time of writing. Retail sentiment around both BTC and ETH remained in the ‘extremely bearish’ zone, with ‘normal’ levels of chatter over the past day. 

Two Ways To Value Crypto, Says Tom Lee

When asked how he comes up with price targets for assets that don’t have traditional earnings, Lee said he uses two anchors. The first is network usage. Wallets and activity per wallet still account for about 87% of the rise of Bitcoin, he said, so the value should rise as adoption and transactions increase.

The second is a comparison against gold. If Bitcoin had the network value of gold, which is heading towards $5,000 per ounce, then Bitcoin would be around $2 million, according to Lee's math. He also noted that gold is "not as scarce as Bitcoin." On Ethereum, he said, every dollar of tokenized assets has historically created about a dollar of value in ETH, so "if you believe Wall Street's going to tokenize, Ethereum's price should go up a lot.”

Read also: MSTR Stock Falls After Strategy Sells Bitcoin For First Time In Nearly Three Years

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