Ethereum (ETH) has followed Bitcoin (BTC) and much of the wider crypto market lower over the past 48 hours, dropping below the key $2,000 support level and reigniting concerns among some investors that a longer bear phase could be underway.
Even with the recent slide, Standard Chartered’s Digital Assets Research Head, Geoff Kendrick, says the bank is not backing away from its bullish long-term outlook for Ethereum.
Ethereum Price Will Catch UpTo illustrate the gap between price action and underlying progress, Kendrick drew a comparison to Amazon during the 2001 dot-com bust. His argument echoes a line often attributed to Jeff Bezos: that while a company’s stock can go the wrong way, “everything inside the company” can still be moving in the right direction.
Kendrick specifically said that Ethereum will “catch up” to those improving internal metrics and suggested that investors are effectively watching a delay between operational strength and market pricing.
ETH Upside SignalsOne of the bank’s central points is Ethereum’s role in stablecoins. Kendrick noted that 54% of all stablecoins are currently issued on the network. He also said stablecoins make up around one-third of all Ethereum transactions in 2026 year-to-date.
Based on that momentum, Standard Chartered projects the stablecoin market cap could increase sixfold from current levels by the end of 2028.
A second major pillar of the bullish case is Ethereum’s position in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs). Kendrick said Ethereum hosts around 62% of RWAs and about 68% of active on-chain loans.
Kendrick’s projections suggest Ethereum could still capture roughly half to two-thirds of both tokenized assets and the related category of growth, with Ethereum hosting an estimated 50% to 65% of those segments.
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $1,991, having retraced by 5% in the weekly timeframe. This means that the altcoin is now trading 59% below its all-time high of $4,964, reached last year.
Featured image created with OpenArt; chart from TradingView.com
