After the Fed announced a rate cut, the crypto market not only did not see the expected continuous rise but instead experienced a violent shakeout on September 22nd — with a single-day liquidation amount reaching as high as $1.7 billion, marking the largest settlement record since December 2024, with ETH liquidation amount nearing $500 million. However, amidst the market carnage, during this bull run, the frequent Ethereum advocate Tom Lee remained bullish on social media, even setting a long-term price target of $60,000 for ETH and claiming that it would not break below the key levels of $4300 and $4000 in the short term, which were subsequently breached.

On September 24th, Andrew Kang, the founder of crypto venture capital firm Mechanism Capital, spoke out against this, bluntly stating that Tom Lee's theory on ETH was "childish" and putting forth five points to refute it, causing quite a stir in the industry.

Andrew Kang's Rebuttal

1. The Adoption of Stablecoins and RWAs Will Not Bring the Expected Benefits

One of Tom Lee's core arguments is that as stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets (RWAs) continue to grow, Ethereum as the underlying settlement layer will benefit from it, with increased transaction volume bringing in more fee revenue, thus giving ETH long-term upside potential.

At first glance, this logic may seem reasonable, but upon closer inspection, you will find that the reality is quite the opposite. Despite the massive expansion of stablecoin trading volume and RWA scale since 2020, Ethereum network's transaction fee revenue has hardly increased. The reason is not complex: network upgrades have improved processing efficiency, reducing the cost per transaction; a significant amount of stablecoin activity is now flowing to other blockchains.

Moreover, the fundamental issue lies in the fact that tokenized financial assets mostly "sit still," their low-frequency circulation cannot contribute enough revenue to the ETH network. You could perfectly record trillions of dollars' worth of bonds on-chain, but if they only trade once a year, they are of less value than a single USDT transfer.

The envisioned "asset securitization = ETH appreciation" is currently being eroded by chains like Solana, Arbitrum, Tempo, among others, even Tether has boldly built its Plasma and Stable chains, keeping transaction volumes within its ecosystem. All of this indicates that ETH's positioning as a "financial bedrock" is facing substantial upheaval in reality.