Standard Chartered analyst Jeff Kendrick maintains a bullish long-term outlook on Ethereum, arguing that the gap between the token's improving intrinsic metrics and its lagging price is temporary, and a recovery is only a matter of time.

Ethereum has fallen 57% from its August 2025 high to around $2,100, while the ETH/BTC ratio has fallen 37% over the same period.

However, Kendrick noted that the number of transactions and the total value locked, measured in ETH, remain near all-time highs. To explain the gap between fundamentals and price, Standard Chartered drew a parallel with Amazon during the 2001 dot-com crash, citing Jeff Bezos's remark that "while the stock price was going wrong, everything was going right internally."

The bank stated that it believes "the same applies to the current ETH price" and sees "significant potential for the ETH price to catch up with its internal metrics."

Standard Chartered reiterated its ETH price forecasts: $4,000 by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by the end of 2030. According to the bank, these targets imply a return of the ETH/BTC ratio to its 2021 highs of around 0.08.

This optimistic scenario is partly based on Ethereum's dominance in the stablecoin and tokenized real-world asset markets—two segments that Standard Chartered expects to see significant growth. The bank predicts that the market capitalization of stablecoins will grow sixfold by the end of 2028, while tokenized real assets that are not stablecoins will increase 50-fold over the same period.

Ethereum currently accounts for 50% to 65% of both markets, which together account for more than half of the total value locked in the network.