Fundstrat’s Tom Lee has a specific analogy for where crypto sits right now. Speaking on CNBC’s Closing Bell, shared by Coin Bureau, he argued crypto in 2026 is what memory stocks were in 2024: foundational to a trend everyone can see, yet ignored by the market until it suddenly isn’t.
Memory stocks are publicly traded companies that design, manufacture, and supply semiconductor memory chips, such as DRAM, NAND flash, and high-bandwidth memory (HBM), used for data storage and processing.
Entities like SK Hynix and Micron spent 2024 and 2025 going nowhere despite being essential to the AI buildout, then went parabolic in 2026. “Memory was a has-been story in 2024 and 2025, they didn’t go anywhere,” Lee said.
“Look what happened in 2026. They all went parabolic.” His claim is that crypto occupies that same overlooked position now, the infrastructure layer for the very thing the market is obsessed with. As he put it: “I think, without question, in 12 months, we’re going to say crypto is a downstream story of AI.”
Lee’s point is that this isn’t speculation about the future, it’s current deployment. He cited weekend oil trading on crypto rails as a current example, not a forecast. “BlackRock is tokenizing almost every asset,” he noted. “Almost every asset is going to be built on a crypto rail.” In his framing, the financial system is being rebuilt on blockchain infrastructure whether retail crypto investors notice or not, the same way memory’s importance was visible long before the stocks moved.
That’s where his timing argument comes in: “It’s slow and then sudden.” Tokenization and composability are moving through the pipeline now, and the market hasn’t priced them for the same reason it ignored memory stocks until the moment it didn’t. He’s candid about the near-term pain, though: “2026 has been a big setback year. It’s disappointing, but the fundamental progress is still there.”
Lee’s adoption argument rests on behavior. Young people bank through apps, not branches, and the next generation of traders will buy tokenized stocks on crypto platforms as casually as they already use Robinhood instead of calling a broker. The FOMO currently flowing into AI equities is simply the path of least resistance, it’s easier to buy a stock than set up a wallet. But that friction, in his view, is generational rather than structural, and as the user base ages into crypto-native habits, the flows rotate.
The analogy is clean, but it’s a forecast, not a fact. Memory stocks did eventually move; that doesn’t guarantee crypto follows the same arc on the same timeline. Lee’s case for tokenization as real, current infrastructure is the strongest part; the parabolic payoff is the part that remains his prediction rather than a certainty.
The post Tom Lee: Crypto Today Is Just Like Memory Stocks in 2024 appeared first on Coindoo.
