Standard Chartered has drawn a parallel between Ethereum's current valuation disconnect and Amazon's experience during the dot-com bubble collapse, arguing that ETH's price will eventually catch up to strengthening network fundamentals. The bank's analysts point to Amazon's 2001 crash—when shares plummeted from $113 to $6 despite underlying business growth—as a historical precedent for how markets fail to recognize long-term value creation until much later.
The research team at Standard Chartered observes that Ethereum exhibits a similar disparity: while ETH price has declined, on-chain metrics show the network gaining strength. The bank maintains a bullish medium-term outlook, forecasting ETH to reach $4,000 by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by the end of 2030, contingent on Ethereum's dominance in emerging blockchain use cases.
The thesis rests on Ethereum's foundational role across three high-growth segments. Standard Chartered expects the stablecoin market to expand sixfold by end-2028, the real-world assets (RWA) market to grow 50-fold over the same period, and Ethereum to capture 50–65 percent of activity across both segments. This positioning in tokenized assets and on-chain lending, the bank argues, provides sufficient structural tailwinds to eventually narrow the valuation gap.