Tom Lee Warns of “Rage Quitting” After Cuban Bitcoin Sale

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says the crypto slump has pushed some investors into “rage quitting,” after Mark Cuban reportedly sold all of his Bitcoin. Lee argued the long-term case for Bitcoin and Ethereum remains intact, even as prices fall and sentiment stays extrem

Crypto investors didn’t just watch prices slide on Monday—they watched the kind of selling that can make a market feel personal.

Fundstrat’s Tom Lee said the recent slump has triggered “rage quitting” among investors, linking the mood to Mark Cuban’s reported decision to sell off all of his Bitcoin holdings. Lee, who serves as the Bitmine Immersion Technologies (BMNR) Chairman, was speaking on CNBC’s SquawkBox.

When asked about Cuban, Lee partly agreed with the thrust of Cuban’s argument: that Bitcoin had failed to act as an inflation hedge, while gold had delivered a better outcome.

“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 current wave of selling as something investors have seen before—characterizing it as a “classic market bottom” and saying it’s “what always happens at the end of crypto winter.”

For all the urgency in the moment. Lee didn’t think the long-term thesis behind the two largest cryptocurrencies is broken. When asked if the case for Bitcoin or Ethereum had been damaged. he said it was “absolutely not. ” adding 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 tied that view to the growth of artificial intelligence. As AI systems evolve to handle commerce and run websites, Lee said, “You need decentralized identity and verification. That’s really what crypto does.”

He also pointed to the push toward tokenization on Wall Street, calling it “a huge improvement in efficiency of actually how money moves.” In his view, that trend will ultimately benefit Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other smart-contract platforms.

The price action underscored the pressure investors are feeling. Ethereum was trading at $1,981, while Bitcoin 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. while ‘normal’ levels of chatter continued over the past day.

Lee’s framework for valuing assets that don’t produce traditional earnings was built around two anchors. First, he said network usage: wallets and activity per wallet still account for about 87% of the rise of Bitcoin, so value should rise as adoption and transactions increase.

Second, he compared crypto to gold. Using what he described as a network-value comparison, Lee said that if Bitcoin had the network value of gold—heading toward $5,000 per ounce—Bitcoin would be around $2 million. He added that gold is “not as scarce as Bitcoin.”

On Ethereum, he said a dollar of tokenized assets has historically created about a dollar of value in ETH. So, if the market believes Wall Street will tokenize, he argued, “Ethereum’s price should go up a lot.”

Tom Lee Mark Cuban Bitcoin Ethereum crypto winter rage quitting network usage tokenization gold comparison AI and decentralized identity Fundstrat