Standard Chartered Sticks to $40K ETH Target as Price Falls

Standard Chartered reaffirmed its $40,000 price target for Ethereum by the end of 2030 and a $4,000 target for the end of 2026 in a client research note as ETH fell below $2,000 for the first time since late March.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research, wrote that on-chain metrics are improving even as the token price weakens. He pointed to transaction counts and total value locked, which he said sit near all-time highs when measured in ETH.

Kendrick compared the divergence between network metrics and token price to Amazon’s experience after the 2001 tech downturn, referencing Jeff Bezos’s view that company fundamentals can improve while the market price declines.

Trading indicators show strain in ETH relative to Bitcoin. The ETH/BTC ratio is about 0.027, a five-year low. On-chain analytics provider Santiment reported a wave of retail “buy the dip” orders after the $2,000 level broke and warned that such retail buying can precede further downside.

The Polymarket prediction market places the probability of ETH closing below $1,500 this year at 54%, supported by roughly $6.4 million in traded volume. At the same time, rising open interest and positive funding rates create about $2 billion of short squeeze exposure if prices reverse and ETH reclaims $2,000.

Kendrick outlined multi-year structural assumptions behind the bank’s targets. He projects stablecoin market capitalization could grow about sixfold by the end of 2028 and tokenized real-world assets could expand roughly fiftyfold over the same period. Standard Chartered expects Ethereum to capture between 50% and 65% of both markets.

Not all observers agree that rising network activity will increase demand for the base token. David Hoffman, co-founder of Bankless, argues value is accruing more to applications and Layer 2 networks than to ETH itself. Standard Chartered’s targets rely on assumptions about how on-chain activity and asset tokenization translate into token-level value.