Standard Chartered just looked at Ethereum’s price, looked at Ethereum’s network activity, and essentially said: these two numbers don’t belong in the same universe.
The investment bank’s analysts argued in a Thursday note that ETH, currently trading around $2,000, is deeply undervalued relative to the volume of transactions flowing through its network and the billions parked in its DeFi ecosystem. Their fix for the math? A year-end target of $4,000 and a $40,000 price tag by the end of the decade.
The Amazon analogy
Standard Chartered drew a pointed comparison to Amazon during the dot-com bust. When the bubble popped in 2001, Jeff Bezos defended his company’s cratering stock by pointing to improving operational metrics. The bank sees a similar dynamic playing out with Ethereum: the price is going one direction while everything underneath is going the other.
Compare that to Bitcoin, which has dropped about 42% from its all-time high near $126,000 to roughly $72,800. Ethereum’s drawdown is significantly steeper, and Standard Chartered thinks the gap is unjustified.
