ETH to $20,000 in 2026? AI examines Tom Lee’s ultra-bullish forecast

Will ETH rise to $60,000 by 2026 as Lee predicted? Here’s ChatGPT’s take on it.

Tom Lee has long been a proponent of cryptocurrency and recently shifted his focus from BTC to ETH. His company, BitMine Immersion Technologies, now owns billions of dollars worth of the largest altcoin.

He has also made numerous bullish predictions about the price trajectory for the coming years. While it appears that his most outrageous target for 2025 will not be met, he recently made a more modest but still quite optimistic prediction for next year: $20,000 per ETH.

Speaking at the Binance blockchain conference in Dubai on Thursday, he noted that such a massive 550% rally could be possible if Ethereum’s role in the RWA space continues to grow.

Is $20K ETH possible?

We asked ChatGPT to evaluate Lee’s prediction based on the information available now and after assuming that Ethereum will indeed play a key role in an ever-growing world of tokenization. It noted that achieving such a big goal “is possible,” but only if several critical conditions align.

It admitted that tokenization appears to be the next big thing in technology, as giants like BlackRock, UBS, JPMorgan and Citi enter the space, and that the migration to blockchain could indeed benefit Ethereum as it is already the dominant settlement layer for such assets.

The AI ​​chatbot also mentioned ETH’s deflationary mechanisms, which were introduced after the Merge and the EIP-1559 upgrade. While they don’t guarantee that the assets will be perpetually deflationary, overall ether production has slowed dramatically since the updates were introduced.

“If network activity increases due to RWAs, strikes and L2 expansion, supply pressure would ease while demand increases – a classic recipe for a big price increase,” ChatGPT said.

The bear case

Some of the hurdles that could stand in the way of ETH’s path to $20,000 come in the form of competition, as other layer 1 networks like Solana, Avalanche, Sui, and Aptos aim to steal some of its dominance in DeFi, RWA, and a few more industry niches.

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Additionally, ChatGPT argued that network activity does not guarantee price increases for the underlying asset, especially if users opt for the layer-2 alternative instead of operating directly on Ethereum.

Finally, reaching a price of $20,000 would mean that ETH’s market cap would have risen to somewhere around $2.5 trillion. This would put ETH well above BTC’s current capitalization and close to giants like Amazon and Microsoft, which sounds unrealistic at this point.

“A rise to $20,000 is not impossible – especially if tokenization becomes a multi-trillion dollar market and Ethereum remains the dominant platform supporting it.

But the timeline may be too aggressive. A more realistic bullish target for 2026 could be between $6,000 and $10,000, barring a super cycle or extreme institutional inflows.

Lee’s vision could still become a reality – perhaps not until later than 2026,” ChatGPT concluded.