Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research Geoffrey Kendrick said Ethereum could climb to $40,000 by 2030 and outperform Bitcoin along the way, arguing that the next wave of tokenization, stablecoin growth, and institutional blockchain buildout is likely to land first on Ethereum. Speaking in a Milk Road interview with John Gillen, Kendrick tied his ETH thesis directly to how traditional finance is approaching on-chain infrastructure. His argument was not that Ethereum wins because of narrative momentum, but because it looks like the safest place for banks, asset managers, and large institutions to start building. Why Ethereum Could Outperform Bitcoin Back in January, Kendrick had published a report titled Ethereum outperformance expected. In the interview, he acknowledged that ETH has struggled on price since then, but said the underlying setup remains intact. “The interesting part here for Ethereum is as tradfi gets involved, tradfi is okay to build stuff on Ethereum,” he said. “It’ll be very safe to say I’m going to build on Ethereum layer one, right? Because it’s never gone down. So I think a lot of this stuff in its first instance happens on Ethereum layer 1.” Related Reading: Ethereum Price Falls Below Psychological $2,000 Support — What Next? He pointed to BlackRock’s rollout strategy as a model for how that adoption could unfold. In Kendrick’s view, institutions are likely to launch first on Ethereum mainnet, then expand to other chains and layer-2s later. That sequencing matters, because he sees activity flowing to the network before value disperses elsewhere. Kendrick said he increasingly views protocol and application fees relative to market cap as one of the more useful ways to think about ETH valuation. More activity in the Ethereum ecosystem, he argued, should translate into a higher token price. “I think that means ETH outperforms now, let’s say for the foreseeable actually,” he said. He added that the ETH/BTC ratio, currently around 0.03 by his framing, could rise to 0.04 this year. Longer term, he said, “I’ve got $500,000 Bitcoin by 2030 and $40,000 Ethereum by 2030. So, a massive outperformance, obviously, a massive absolute potential upside from here.” The broader engine behind that call is tokenization. Kendrick said stablecoins could rise from roughly $300 billion today to $2 trillion over the next few years, and argued that this would create knock-on demand for tokenized money market funds. Corporate treasurers, he said, will not want to hold only tokenized cash if the rest of their idle capital remains trapped in slower off-chain systems. “Tomorrow, if you want to get access to stablecoins because of their 24/7 instantaneous, near-free benefits, you want to take all the million dollars onchain,” Kendrick said. “You don’t want to go out of stable coins and back into idiotic fiat, which is ridiculously slow by comparison. Rather, you’d like to have all of your off-chain money market funds onchain as well.” Related Reading: Unknown Wallet Buys $107 Million In Ethereum – Purchase Pattern Points To Bitmine That leads to one of his bigger numerical calls. Tokenized money market funds, which he said are about $10 billion today, could reach $750 billion by the end of 2028. He based that on the assumption that even if only 10% of transactions move into stablecoins over the next few years, a similar share of money market fund exposure would likely need to come on-chain too. He also forecast that other tokenized assets could grow from around $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, describing that as a 50x move in three years. From there, Kendrick sees a path into DeFi. If regulatory clarity improves, he said, traditional finance and DeFi could begin meeting in the middle, with consumer-facing apps using blockchain rails in the background to route cash into products like Aave, Morpho, or Compound. “There’s a huge financial fairness and financial inclusion stuff that I think we circle back to from DeFi,” he said. “Most people won’t know where it’s coming from, but you’ll get that style of stuff, I think, in the next few years.” For Kendrick, that is the core of the Ethereum trade. If tokenized dollars, tokenized funds, and eventually tokenized equities pull institutional liquidity on-chain, the first phase of that buildout is likely to happen where compliance teams are most comfortable. In his telling, that still points to Ethereum. At press time, ETH traded at $2,059. Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick says Bitcoin could still face a final washout to $50,000 before recovering sharply, arguing that the current drawdown looks more like a macro-led tech capitulation than a crypto-specific breakdown. Speaking on Deribit’s Crypto Options Unplugged, Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, said he still expects Bitcoin to end the year at $100,000 and reach $500,000 by 2030, even as he warned that the near-term setup remains fragile. “Picking the bottom is always extremely difficult,” Kendrick said, framing the recent selloff as mostly orderly outside a few volatile weeks. He argued that institutional positioning has held up better than many expected, pointing to relatively sticky ETF exposure and continued buying from MicroStrategy even after the stock’s premium to net asset value fell below one. Related Reading: 43% of Bitcoin Supply Is In Loss As Market Nears Bear Territory Still, Kendrick said the market may not be done deleveraging. “I suspect we could still see that final capitulation. Now, it could be macro driven,” he said. “Bitcoin and crypto assets more broadly is still very highly correlated with the Nasdaq.” In his view, weaker earnings from large US tech names over the next few months, combined with a lack of immediate Federal Reserve support, could drag crypto lower alongside equities. That, he said, is what makes the $50,000 level plausible. Kendrick compared the potential move with prior cycle drawdowns, noting that a decline to that zone would still be shallower than the roughly 75% peak-to-trough drop seen in the previous cycle. The key difference this time, he argued, is the absence so far of a major internal crypto failure on the scale of FTX. Why Kendrick Is Long-Term Bullish On Bitcoin Even so, Kendrick’s medium- and long-term thesis remains emphatically bullish. He tied that outlook less to short-term trading flows than to what he sees as a structural shift driven by stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Last year, when stablecoins stood around $200 billion, Kendrick projected they could grow to $2 trillion by the end of 2028. He said the market is now closer to $300 billion, with much of that demand coming not from crypto trading but from savings use cases in emerging markets. “What’s replaced it has primarily been savings in emerging markets,” Kendrick said, referring to stablecoins’ original role as on-off ramps for crypto trading. “On my estimate of the $300 billion, about $200 [billion] is for EM savings use case.” He added that much of that capital appears to sit in large wallets and turns over infrequently, suggesting it is being used more as stored value than transactional float. Related Reading: Bitcoin SOPR Ratio Shows Early Capitulation—But Not Full Bottom Yet Kendrick’s broader argument is that this trend could have macro consequences well beyond crypto. If stablecoin issuers absorb close to $1 trillion in additional T-bill demand over the next three years, he said, the US Treasury may respond by shifting issuance toward the front end, flattening the yield curve and reinforcing dollar demand. In his telling, that liquidity effect could eventually become a tailwind for risk assets, including Bitcoin. “I think we go down to, let’s say, $50,000 and back to $100,000 by the end of this year and $500,000 by 2030,” Kendrick said. “Ironically, if stablecoins are massive and Genius Act is as it is, the inflow of cash on liquidity and flattening yield curve and all that sort of stuff becomes massively supportive of Bitcoin medium term.” He extended that optimism across other large-cap crypto assets. Kendrick said he sees Ethereum reaching $40,000 and Solana hitting $2,000 by 2030, with Ethereum benefiting from stablecoin and tokenization activity and Solana from ultra-low-cost transaction flows and micropayments. He also projected tokenized real-world assets could grow from roughly $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028. For now, though, Kendrick’s message was less about chasing momentum than about separating market price from underlying adoption. “Pretty much all the underlying metrics, if you like, have been improving,” he said. “Except for the price.” At press time, Bitcoin traded at $70,260. Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com