Lee argues that for much of the first half of the year, the financial world’s attention was monopolized by the explosion of artificial intelligence (AI) and its associated equities. This "AI mania" led many fund managers to overlook the maturing crypto market. However, the data from the third quarter has become impossible to ignore. Since the end of June, ether has surged by 76%, vastly outstripping the S&P 500, which managed a modest 2% gain over the same period.
"Given that institutions have underweighted crypto in 2026, partially due to the outperformance of AI stocks in the early part of the year, we expect a substantial increase in exposure during the final three months of the year," Lee stated. He suggested that fund managers, who are often judged against benchmarks, are now facing "career risk" by not having exposure to an asset class that is clearly leading the market in the second half of the year.
This "catch-up" trade is expected to be a primary driver of liquidity in the fourth quarter. As professional money managers rebalance their portfolios for year-end reporting, the massive performance gap between Ethereum and traditional indices is likely to force a rotation of capital into digital assets.
Convergence: AI, Tokenization, and the Long-Term Bull Case
Beyond the immediate price action and the "catch-up" narrative, Lee pointed to structural changes in the technology landscape as reasons for sustained institutional interest. Specifically, he highlighted the growing intersection between artificial intelligence and blockchain technology.
As AI models require increasingly large amounts of data and compute power, blockchain is being viewed as a potential solution for transparently tracking data provenance and managing decentralized compute resources. Ethereum, as the most widely used smart-contract platform, is the natural beneficiary of this convergence. Lee believes that as more AI-linked projects begin to utilize Ethereum’s infrastructure, the utility-driven demand for ETH will create a floor for the price that is independent of speculative trading.
Furthermore, the trend toward the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) continues to gain momentum. Major financial institutions are increasingly exploring the use of the Ethereum blockchain to settle everything from private equity funds to government bonds. Lee noted that as these institutional use cases move from pilot programs to full-scale implementation, the demand for Ethereum as a settlement layer will grow exponentially.
For Bitmine, this long-term outlook justifies its aggressive accumulation even as prices reach yearly highs. By securing a significant portion of the supply now, the company is positioning itself as a "landlord" of the digital economy, owning the very asset required to facilitate transactions and run applications on the world’s most active blockchain.
