Tom Lee Says Crypto Is A 'Huge Winner' As Banks Move Toward Tech-Style Valuations, While Dan Ives Calls AI A 'Two-Horse Race'

Fundstrat picked JP Morgan as a core buy and Robinhood, Galaxy Digital, and Riot Platforms as bottom five recommendations, cautious on crypto-sensitive stocks.

• BMNR’s Chairman Tom Lee said financial firms will start trading like tech stocks as AI and blockchain reshape their industry. 
• Wedbush's Dan Ives stuck to AI, calling the AI race a “two-horse race” between the U.S. and China. 
• The comments followed Fundstrat's stock list update last month, which added JP Morgan as a buy.

Bitmine Immersion Technologies Inc. (BMNR) Chairman Tom Lee said big banks should be valued more like tech companies as AI and blockchain alter the industry. He dubbed crypto a “huge winner.” Wedbush’s Dan Ives, on the same panel, called the artificial intelligence (AI) contest a “two-horse race.”

In a panel discussion at the Future Proof conference, Lee said banks are not ready for a world where robots pay for things themselves in tiny automatic payments, facilitated by AI agents, because the industry cannot easily check who is sending those instructions.  

Lee Calls Crypto A Winner 

Big financial firms should be valued like tech companies because AI and robots will move much of finance onto blockchains, Lee said. 

The financial industry is not designed to deal with robots, Lee said, “and robots make tiny payments and increase the risk of fraud. He also said that firms do not know who is giving a robot its instructions. "So there's a real innovation taking place in the financial services world, actually, a lot of it is going to be built on blockchain." That’s why he expects much of the new financial infrastructure to be built on blockchains, which he said makes crypto a "huge winner" eventually. The best financial firms will turn into tech stocks, and their price-to-earnings multiples should be rising as such, Lee said.