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Standard Chartered Says Ethereum Price Can Reach $35,000, Here’s When

Ethereum has struggled alongside Bitcoin through the current bear market climate but this has not stopped bullish predictions for the digital asset. The most recent bullish prediction comes from British multinational bank Standard Chartered which believes that the Ethereum price could climb higher than  $8,000.

Factors That Could Trigger The Rise

Geoff Kendrick, Head of Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered Bank has revealed his forecast for the Ethereum price in a research note. According to the researcher, he sees big things in the future of the digital asset which could climb higher than $8,000 in the coming years.

Talking about the asset’s valuation, Kendrick points toward the many use cases for Ethereum that have emerged over the years but also sees more use cases emerging as time goes on. One of those is the much-coveted gaming and asset tokenization sector.

Also, the Standard Chartered researcher said that they expect that Ethereum will see more growth than the pioneer cryptocurrency, Bitcoin. While he expects Bitcoin to rise 3.5x, they believe Ethereum will rise 5 from current levels.

“We think the path higher for ETH prices may take longer than for BTC, but we see ETH eventually reaching a higher price multiple than BTC relative to current levels (5.0x versus 3.5x),” the researcher said.

He also believes that Ethereum would go on to further register its dominance in the space, especially with the Layer 2 blockchains such as Arbitrum that have popped up to enhance the network. This, he believes, would lead to an increase in the Ethereum profit-earnings ratio (P/E ratio).

Ethereum price chart from Tradingview.com (Standard Chartered)

Ethereum Could Climb Above $8,000

In terms of actual dollar values, $8,000 is not the only figure that the researcher dropped for the Ethereum price. The expectations for the digital asset exceed this four-digit figure right into the five-digit territory as Kendrick believes ETH could rise to anywhere between $26,000 and $35,000.

As for when this might happen, the researcher seems to be targeting the next bull market as he expects the factors that will drive this value growth to happen between 2025-2026. “We see the $8,000 level as a stepping stone to our long-term ‘structural’ valuation estimate of $26,000-$35,000,” he said in the note. Then beyond this, the researcher expects the price to continue to rise.

This is not the first time that Kendrick has released a bullish prediction for cryptocurrencies. He previously said he expects the price of Bitcoin to reach $120,000 and the entire crypto market to rise as well. However, it seems the researcher is much more bullish on ETH.

Not everyone has provided bullish forecasts for ETH though. One crypto analyst actually believes that the digital asset is set for more decline. In the analyst, FieryTrading suggests that Ethereum’s price could fall as low as $900.

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Standard Chartered Takes Bullish Stand On Ethereum, Puts Price At $35,000

Ethereum has seen some optimistic price predictions this year. While a lot of analysts have erred on the conservative side, others have gone the route of being overly optimistic. With some putting the price of the altcoin at $20,000, like in the case of Real Vision founder Raoul Pal. But none have gone as high as where the British banking giant puts the price of the asset.

There has been widespread sentiment in the market regarding the potential of Ethereum to overtake Bitcoin at some point, and it looks like institutions believe this too. Last month, deVere CEO Nigel Green said in a statement that Ethereum was set to outperform Bitcoin in the long run. Green pointed to numbers from the past year which already showed that the former was already outperforming the latter in the market, giving it a timeline of five years.

Related Reading | Flash Crash, Ethereum Tests Support With 17% Drop And Risks Further Losses

Standard Chartered More Bullish On Ethereum

Standard Chartered released a new report on crypto on Tuesday. In it showed the bank’s view on cryptocurrencies, with a focus on Bitcoin and Ethereum. The report showed the banking giant had a more favorable view on Ether, which it believes is superior to Bitcoin due to the fact that it is akin to a financial market. The rise of decentralized finance (DeFi) has seen the rise of protocols offering alternatives to traditional financial services like lending, borrowing, and yield farming.

Related Reading | New To Bitcoin? Learn To Trade Crypto With The NewsBTC Trading Course

Standard Chartered sees Bitcoin doing well in the long run, but not performing as well as Ether because it is more like a currency. The bank sees the use cases of Ethereum being the major catalyst that sees the market capitalization overtake that of Bitcoin.

Longer-term price predictions came out to the range of $50,000 to $175,000 over the long term for Bitcoin. Only about a 300% price increase for the asset from its current levels. While the report put forth a much more optimistic price prediction for Ethereum. Standard Chartered expects that the price of ETH in the long term will be in the $26,000 to $35,000 range, predicting a 1,000% increase in the price from its current point.

ETH Keeps Outperforming BTC

At first glance, Standard Chartered’s prediction for both cryptos may seem too wild to be true. But a look at the charts for both assets shows that the analysts are on to something here. In 2021 alone, Bitcoin has grown about 38% to the present day. On the other hand, Ethereum has grown 240% this year alone. A year-over-year analysis shows that ETH has consistently outperformed BTC in the market. Coupled with its use cases, this makes it a prime candidate for institutional investments.

BTC has grown 38% in 2021 | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

ETH has grown 240% in 2021 | Source: ETHUSD on TradingView.com

One thing the Standard Chartered report does acknowledge though is the importance of BTC growth to that of ETH. Although it is bullish on ETH, it acknowledges that for ETH to get to the predicted price point, BTC would actually need to first get to its predicted $175,000.

Featured image from ETF Stream, charts from TradingView.com

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Kraken Director Dan Held Tags Traditional Financial Institutions A “Cartel”

Kraken Director Dan Held recently posted a tweet that shows what he thinks of the traditional banking system.

Are traditional banks truly a collision of government financial structures for monopoly? A necessary fact-check and digging into the actual status of the state-owned bricks and mortar financial depository institutions comes to bear following Dan Held’s recent tweet.

Dan’s Profile

Dan Held, at present, is the Director of Growth Marketing at Kraken. A company he sold his erstwhile company called Interchange to. The company was a portfolio reconciliation tool for crypto institutional traders. Kraken acquired Interchange in July of 2019.

He has, over time, been actively involved in crypto activities. For instance, before his role at Kraken, Dan created some of the most prominent earlier crypto products, including ChangeTip and ZeroBlock acquired by AirBnB and ZeroBlock and Blockchain.com, respectively, second-ever all Bitcoin acquisition.

Related Reading | Controversial Bitcoin Mining Council Confirms “Sustainable Power Mix”

2013 is worthy of mentioning as the year he was part of the original crypto meetup group in SF. The meetup comprised of crypto giants like the founders of Coinbase, Litecoin, and Kraken, which he now works for.

As ardent crypto, particularly bitcoin, influencer, the U.S. national recently took to his Twitter media page on Thursday to label the structure of traditional financial institutions as equivalent to “a cartel.”

What Dan Held Thinks Of Traditional Banks

To Dan, “Institutions” are referred to as financial institutions, otherwise known as banking institutions, which are corporations that provide services as intermediaries of financial markets that are formed to monopolize the financial market.

They include central banks, sovereign wealth funds, different types of banks (ex: commercial/investment), brokerages, and insurance firms. However, Dan’s tagged – “a cartel” was exclusively for the state’s banks other than the private ones, as perceived.

So was he in any way right terming them a cartel?

Traditional Banks: A Cartel Or Not? Findings Show, He Might Be Right

A study reported in 2020 ships in some support to Dan’s claim. The study posits that Banks are becoming “instruments, rather than conduits, of monetary policy.”

In the advanced civilizations, most significantly, the 2020 findings uncovered that since the 2008 financial crisis, private banks had been subjected to some brutal regulatory changes in the hands of state-owned ones.

From pricing caps on loans to floors on deposits to rising capital buffer requirements, and the list goes on, the pain for many minority shareholders is seemingly endless.

Many countries, especially the developing ones, have gone one step ahead in terms of their involvement in the banking sector of their respective states.

However, the study highlights that the authority of these countries is making an effort to fuel the dominance of state-owned banks over private players.

Related Reading | Scaramucci’s Skybridge Capital Launches Ethereum Fund

And then some take “outright stakes in formerly ‘private’ banks (in both friendly and less than amicable manners), to exercise an increasingly populist form of monetarism.”

JP Morgan Chief Confirmation

Comments from the likes of Jamie Dimon, a central figure in JP Morgan, a global leader in financial services offering solutions to the world’s most important corporations, governments, etc., drives home Dan Held’s tweet. The Chief Executive during a financial crisis period was once quoted as saying,

“I believe there were people … who were greedy, selfish, did the wrong stuff, overpaid themselves, and couldn’t give a damn. Yes.”

His utterance reflected the monopoly, resultant corruption, and abuse the state-backed financial institutions’ players were enjoying at the time at the expense of the common good.

Regulatory default

Another report in the same year on findings by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) shows that five global central banks have been detected siphoning trillions of dollars in criminal funds in the recently leaked FinCEN Files.

The shocking finding is 2,100 documents stretching from 2000 to 2017. It reveals swindling funds flowed almost effortlessly through JPMorgan, HSBC, Standard Chartered Bank, Deutsche Bank, and Bank of New York Mellon.

The detected FinCEN Files show that Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) and other world government-controlled regulatory bodies rarely prosecute the world’s banking cartel.

Related Reading | FinCEN Issues Advisory On Iran’s “Illicit” Use of Crypto to Bypass Sanctions

It Was All About Decentralized and Centralized Antagonism

Nonetheless, the support of the fact checks on his claim, we assume Dan’s stance has been triggered by the competition between Bitcoin and the government-backed legal tender.

Kraken Director Dan Held Tags Traditional Financial Institutions A “Cartel”
Bitcoin falls back in the red-zone | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.com

While Dan Held is trustworthy, many think it was mere advocacy for Bitcoin against the regulatory competitor.

Featured image from Dan Held Twitter, chart from TradingView.com