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.”
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.
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.
TOM LEE: THE ETHEREUM BOTTOM IS IN 
Bitmine x TOM DEMARK mapped ETH against past S&P 500 crash recoveries.
The structure now closely matches 1987 and 2011, both major cycle bottoms.
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.”
At press time, ETH traded at $2,147.
