Standard Chartered reaffirmed its $4,000 year-end 2026 price target for Ether and its $40,000 target for end-2030 in a research note published May 28, arguing that ETH‘s recent price decline has decoupled from the network’s underlying activity in a way that is temporary and will eventually correct, per the note authored by Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research.
ETH has fallen roughly 57% from its August 2025 peak near $4,946, trading around $2,000 at the time of the note and briefly touching the low $1,900s in late May — its weakest level since late March. The ETH/BTC ratio has dropped approximately 37% over the same period to around 0.027, a five-year low. Yet Kendrick’s note asserts that transaction counts and total value locked, measured in ETH terms, remain near record highs. “Internal metrics for Ethereum continue to improve,” the note states, “however, the ETH price continues to underperform in both absolute and relative terms.”
The core analogy in Kendrick’s argument is Amazon’s stock during the 2001 dot-com collapse. He cited a 2018 Jeff Bezos speech in which Bezos described watching Amazon shares fall from $113 to $6 while the underlying business kept growing — shares that have since risen roughly 1,000-fold. “ETH will catch up to the internal metrics, it is just a matter of time,” Kendrick wrote. The comparison is structural, not predictive: Standard Chartered is not forecasting an equivalent magnitude of return, but using it to argue that price and fundamentals are temporarily disconnected.
Three structural pillars underpin the bank’s case. Ethereum currently hosts approximately 54% of the $321 billion global stablecoin market, with stablecoins accounting for roughly one-third of all Ethereum transactions year-to-date in 2026. Standard Chartered projects the stablecoin market cap could grow sixfold to approximately $2 trillion by end-2028. On tokenized real-world assets, Ethereum captures around 62% of the sector and 68% of active on-chain loans; the bank projects the non-stablecoin RWA sector to expand fiftyfold over the same period. Kendrick also cited the upcoming Glamsterdam protocol upgrade as a catalyst not yet priced into spot markets.
The bank’s multi-year price path runs $4,000 at end-2026, $10,000 in 2027, $18,000 in 2028, $28,000 in 2029, and $40,000 by end-2030. Reaching $4,000 by year-end would require ETH to more than double from current levels and would bring the ETH/BTC ratio back toward 0.08 — its 2021 high. Per Santiment data cited in the note, retail traders responded to the sub-$2,000 break with a wave of buy-the-dip activity, while institutional flows moved in the opposite direction.
