Standard Chartered predicts ethereum will more than double this year
The investment bank thinks the prospects for ethereum have improved, citing BitMine’s continued buying, stablecoin adoption, the plan to increase the network’s throughput, and the passage of crypto-focused legislation.
Standard Chartered expects ethereum to outperform its older sibling bitcoin in the year.
Even though the firm lowered its end-of-year ethereum forecast from $12,000 to $7,500, Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, says the ETH-BTC ratio will return to 2021 highs.
According to a Monday research note, the forecast is largely informed by the network’s structural advantages, regulatory advancements, and flows from ETFs and treasury firms, such as BitMine Immersion Technologies, which added 24,266 tokens last week.
Standard Chartered expects the network to increase its throughput by 10x over two to three years following Vitalik Buterin’s 2025 announcement as well as optimism that the CLARITY Act, which aims to create a framework for digital asset markets, will pass the Senate.
The firm also sees stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and decentralized finance growing and for ethereum’s share to rise in tandem “as more TradFi activities move into the blockchain space, given that ethereum is trusted in the TradFi World.”
“Ethereum has been operating for over 10 years and its network has never gone down,” Kendrick wrote. “While other blockchains may be faster and cheaper, reliability will always trump marginal speed and cost savings for TradFi operators.”
On Monday, Buterin introduced the “walkway test,” where the network’s value proposition is not strictly tied to features that are not in the protocol already.
Passing this test includes full quantum resistance, scalable architecture to “many thousands of TPS [transactions per second],” and a block-building model resistant to centralization pressures.
