"2026 augurs many positive things for crypto with stablecoin adoption and tokenization driving to make blockchain the settlement layer of Wall Street, particularly favoring Ethereum," said BitMine Chairman Tom Lee in a statement.
The firm’s future confidence in the second-largest asset by market capitalization is supported by a new research note published Monday by banking giant Standard Chartered, which gives a nod to BitMine’s continued buying as a catalyst for ETH’s outperformance versus Bitcoin moving forward.
“We see several drivers of ETH outperformance,” wrote Standard Chartered Analyst Geoff Kendrick. “While all digital assets have seen slower inflows via ETFs and digital asset corporate treasury companies (DATs), continued buying by BMNR—the largest ETH DAT—puts ETH at a relative advantage.”
Like Lee, Kendrick also points to stablecoin adoption and real-world asset tokenization as important trends that will buoy ETH moving forward, and ultimately shrink the ETH-BTC ratio in the future.
The global bank revised down its near-term price targets for ETH based on weakened crypto performance, now suggesting a price of $7,500 in 2026—which still would comprise a record peak for ETH—compared to previous projections of $12,000.
But alongside the near-term revisions, Standard Chartered increased its longer-term outlooks, now predicting prices of $30,000 for ETH by 2029, and $40,000 by 2030.
“In absolute terms, Bitcoin’s weaker-than-expected performance has prompted us to downgrade our BTC forecasts and push out our eventual $500,000 forecast to 2030,” wrote Kendrick.
“Given Bitcoin’s dominance of the digital assets space, we also downgrade our ETH-USD forecasts for the next few years,” he added. “In relative terms, however, we think prospects for Ethereum have turned more positive.”
ETH would need to jump nearly 1,200% to hit Standard Chartered’s $40,000 price target, based on its Monday trading price. The asset is roughly flat over the last 24 hours, recently changing hands at $3,132. It remains almost 37% off its 2025 all-time high price of $4,496.
