## Answer: where the $25,000–$50,000 ETH claim comes from

The forwarded posts are all second-hand summaries of a Tom Lee price call, plus one long-form gloss that tries to rationalize it.

@cryptorover on Oct 6, 2026: "Tom Lee just said Ethereum could hit $25,000-$50,000 this year. Bullish for $ETH!"
@crypto_banter on Oct 6, 2026: "TOM LEE SAYS ETH CAN HIT $25,000 TO $50,000 THIS CYCLE!" — describes Lee as "Fundstrat's head of research and BitMine's chairman," said "on stage," calling Ethereum "the most neutral infrastructure," citing "100% uptime," ETH having "sat near $2,700 for five years," and "the longer the base, the bigger the breakout."
@TokenizedDollar on Oct 6, 2026: "Tom Lee says $ETH peaks at $25,000–$50,000 this cycle. I ran the math, the 4-year cycle, AI agents and the tokenization supercycle. Here's what it would actually take" — linking to the article below.

No primary video / transcript of Lee was retrievable in X search, news-wire search or Telegram search; the only verbatim Lee quotes available are those reproduced inside the linked article.

### The linked article's version

Can $ETH 10x by 2029? Tom Lee, AI Agents, and the 4-Year Cycle — by @TokenizedDollar

As reproduced in the post preview, the article attributes this to Lee:

> On CNBC this week: Bitcoin bottomed at $60K → "probably going to peak at around $500,000."

> On Ethereum: "It's been consolidating for almost five years. It's now $2,700. It's probably going to peak around $25,000 or $50,000."

> On timing: "2028 would probably be the peak in Bitcoin before another bear market starts."

It adds that "last month he told Coinage that a 10-12x move above ETH's old ~$5,000 high 'would take us to $60,000.'"

ETH was quoted at ~$2,695 in market data on Oct 6, 2026, consistent with the article's "now $2,700" framing.

### Basis / assumptions the article gives

1. 4-year halving-cycle extrapolation — the core math

New BTC issuance halves roughly every 4 years (2012, 2016, 2020, 2024), peaks 12-18 months later, then a bear market.
Peaks in 2017, 2021, 2025 — BTC topped near $126K in Oct 2025, ETH just under $5,000 in Aug 2025.
2026 followed the script: ETH fell ~70% to ~$1,500 in June; "Lee says the bottom is happening now."
Author's read of Lee's BTC math: ~8x from 2022 low (~$15.5K) to 2025 peak; repeat 8x from $60K → ~$500K.
ETH $25K–$50K is presented as the analogous "predictable sort of measured moves, only bigger" — i.e. a 9x–18x from ~$2,700, or ~5x–10x above the prior ~$5K high — with top in 2028 per Lee vs. textbook halving calendar pointing to 2029.

2. "This cycle could break the rule" — institutional plumbing

The article lists, as evidence that flows rather than retail will drive it:

US spot Ether ETFs hold ~$17.7B, ~5% of ETH market cap
BitMine alone holds 6.02M ETH, 4.9% of all ETH
~35% of ETH staked
$148B of $313B stablecoins on Ethereum
~$38B real-world assets on-chain, ~43% on Ethereum; SEC approved Nasdaq tokenized-stock trading in March
Coinbase/Base, Robinhood Chain, Sony/Soneium, Kraken/Ink building L2s on Ethereum
GENIUS Act became law July 2025, effective by Jan 2027
ETH beat S&P 500 by ~68pp in Q3 per BitMine despite Fed hike in September

Lee thesis quoted: "this future tokenization is taking place on public smart blockchains. The biggest of these is Ethereum."

3. AI-agent demand

AI trade moving from chips → servers/power → "rails AI money moves on"; Ethereum as the "land."
Agents "carry wallets, and make payments" within 3 years at "pretty close to 100 percent" odds per Lee.
x402 (Coinbase agent-payments standard) settled ~190M payments across 12 chains, Base biggest; Google AP2 crypto extension built on x402 with Coinbase/Ethereum Foundation/MetaMask; Stripe accepting x402 USDC on Base; ERC-8004 agent identity standard.

The visible preview truncates at "co-written by people from Met..." — the promised later sections ("the paths, and the honest part" / what it would actually take in valuation terms) were not retrievable; the X Article URL is login-walled and no mirror was indexed.

### What this does *not* establish

The $25K–$50K figure as supplied is an attributed cycle-top opinion, not a discounted-cash-flow, fee-multiple or supply model. The article provides cycle-analogy arithmetic for BTC and narrative adoption evidence for ETH, but no ETH-specific bridge (fees, burn, staking yield, market-cap math) in the retrievable text. Independent confirmation of the CNBC / Coinage Lee quotes was not found in the searched sources.