Fundstrat’s Tom Lee says the artificial intelligence (AI) trade is not finished. He argues the next leg runs through crypto payment rails built for software agents rather than people.

Veteran macro investor Jordi Visser argued the opposite this week. Lee also chairs the largest corporate holder of ether, which gives his version of the thesis a direct financial stake.

Why Lee Says Chips Were Only the First Leg

Lee, co-founder and head of research at Fundstrat, made the case on a panel hosted by the firm. He covered mobile phones as an analyst in the early 1990s.

Motorola and the infrastructure suppliers led that cycle early. The larger winners arrived later, namely the tower companies spun out of the carriers, and Apple.

Lee expects the same shape now, with financial services as the downstream market. He has already called AI capital spending fears a bullish market tell.

The Four Reasons Banks Cannot Bank Agents

Lee listed trust, proof of funds, lending, and tax collection as the reasons people built commerce around banks. Agents need none of those, he argued.

“It’s a mistake to think that this is going to be built on traditional financial rails,” Lee said.

Bank ledgers must settle in a single national currency. Money is becoming code, according to Lee, so equities, gold, and tokens could all clear as payment.

Part of that rail already exists on paper. ERC-8183, a proposed Ethereum standard filed on Feb. 25, locks an agent’s payment in escrow until a designated evaluator signs off.

Ethereum Foundation researcher Davide Crapis co-authored it with three Virtuals Protocol engineers. It carries Draft status, so nothing about it is final.

Where Tom Lee and Visser Split on the AI Trade

Visser leads AI research at 22V Research and spent two decades at Weiss Multi-Strategy Advisers, latterly as chief investment officer. He says AI’s easy money is over.

He now expects roughly 30% a year instead of the seven or eight times investors once chased. Lee reads the same compression as rotation.

The two converge on the destination. Both expect fee-earning networks to absorb the flow, and both name Ethereum.

Ethereum trades near $1,873 after gaining 19.7% over 30 days. It still sits 51% lower across 12 months, and just over 2% below its trading price the previous day.

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Lee’s $11.8 Billion Reason to Prefer Ethereum

Lee chairs BitMine Immersion Technologies, the largest corporate holder of ether. The company disclosed 5.79 million ETH on July 27, close to 4.8% of circulating supply.

Crypto and cash holdings reached $11.8 billion. BitMine states the dependency plainly in its own investor materials.

“So our future price for Bitmine stock is heavily dependent on the future price of Ethereum,” Lee said in the July chairman’s message.

Lee puts the correlation between BitMine shares and ether at 90%. Anyone weighing his agent thesis is also weighing that balance sheet, which rallied this month on its ETH treasury bet.

The Numbers Do Not Match the Story Yet

Jansen Teng, co-founder and chief executive of Virtuals Protocol, shared the panel with Lee. His platform lets agents hold wallets and pay each other onchain, and his figures undercut the timeline.

Teng said the launchpad for agent tokens has cleared about $15 billion in trading volume. Agent-to-agent commerce has settled roughly $500 million in a year.

Speculating on agents is therefore some 30 times larger than agents transacting. Both figures are company-reported and have not been independently verified.

Teng said the agents kept $2.5 million in profit, and that the product has not reached product-market fit (PMF). Virtuals commissioned the Fundstrat research and is a client of the firm.

Its VIRTUAL token trades near $0.56, down 89% from a January 2025 peak, even after agents started trading tokenized stocks onchain.

So the question is not whether the AI trade ended. It is whether machine payments arrive before the balance sheets betting on them need the story to work.

Source: BeInCrypto