Tom Lee Calls a Crypto Bottom as Metals Frenzy Cools: BTC Near $77K, ETH Around $2.27K

Crypto tends to bottom when time, price, and positioning finally line up. Tom Lee argues we’re close. After a sharp drawdown and a metals-driven liquidity detour, the Fundstrat co-founder told CNBC that Bitcoin and Ethereum appear to have reached a floor, with prices overshooting while fundamentals quietly improved.

Prices have slipped since his remarks, which often happens as markets test conviction. Per CoinGecko on Tuesday, Bitcoin traded near $77,357, down 1.4% over 24 hours and 11.8% week-on-week. Ethereum hovered around $2,265, off 3.5% on the day and more than 22% over seven days.

What changed wasn’t leverage—Lee noted the market wasn’t overly margined—but flows. Capital rotated into precious metals earlier this year, draining risk appetite from digital assets. The rotation then snapped back hard: gold and silver had rallied roughly 37.4% and 106.9% in recent months before a violent reversal late last week. Gold briefly punched above $5,600/oz to a new high, then dropped more than 9% on Friday—the steepest one-day fall since 1983. Silver plunged up to 27% before clawing back some losses. Spot gold recently traded around $4,923, with silver near $87.

Lee framed the backdrop as politically charged. A front-loaded policy push out of Washington ahead of the midterms—and a tendency to “pick winners and losers” early—has encouraged risk aversion. He also flagged the Federal Reserve handoff risk: markets often test new or newly empowered central bank leadership. The confirmation process for Kevin Warsh, named by Trump as Fed chair, and the first FOMC under a new dynamic could make midyear choppy. Seasonality offers a counterweight; when the first week and month are strong, full-year returns often skew higher.

The crux of Lee’s view is a time-and-price exhaustion. Technician Tom DeMark had projected Bitcoin into the high $70,000s and ETH near $2,400. With those levels tagged and sufficient time elapsed, Lee sees a potential inflection. That squares with a cleaner system—limited forced sellers—and some improvement in network activity.

One caveat: not every on-chain uptick reflects organic demand. While Lee cited accelerating Ethereum addresses and transactions, researcher Andrey Sergeenkov has tied the recent surge in ETH addresses to address poisoning attacks. If key metrics are contaminated by spam, the signal-to-noise problem can skew positioning and narrative. That’s precisely where bottoms get made: when data looks contradictory, traders anchor to the wrong inputs, and real liquidity quietly accumulates.

The strongest tell might be skin in the game. BitMine Immersion Technologies—an Ethereum treasury company chaired by Lee—added 41,788 ETH last week, roughly $96 million. The firm now holds more than 4.28 million ETH, over 3.5% of circulating supply, valued around $9.9 billion. It is also carrying more than $6 billion in unrealized losses after buying much of its stack near a $4,000 average price, according to its latest SEC filing. That combination—sizable conviction with headline losses—tends to polarize investors. Some will see it as a vote of confidence; others will highlight concentration risk, treasury governance, and the psychological drag of deep drawdowns. Both can be true.

Bottoms rarely look clean. Liquidity rotates unpredictably, policy noise elevates uncertainty, technicals exhaust slowly, and the best data points are the ones everyone doubts. Lee’s call hinges on that alignment: time and price have largely done their job; leverage is contained; metals mania is deflating; and the market is debating the quality of on-chain signals. That setup doesn’t guarantee immediate upside, but it often sets the stage for patient accumulation to get paid when the policy dust settles and risk budgets reopen.