Ether in Structural Decline, Year-End Price Target Slashed to $4K: Standard Chartered

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Layer 2 blockchains were meant to improve scalability on the Ethereum network, but Coinbase's Base has reduced ether's market cap by $50 billion, the report said.

Mar 17, 2025, 1:18 p.m. UTC

Ether's (ETH) structural decline is expected to continue, investment bank Standard Chartered (STAN) said in a research report Monday slashing its 2025 year-end price target for the world's second largest cryptocurrency.

Standard Chartered said it now sees ether at $4,000 at the end of the year, down from $10,000 previously. Ether was trading around $1,903 at publication time.

"Ether is at a crossroads," the report said, and while it "still dominates on several metrics," this dominance has been falling for some time.

Layer 2 blockchains were meant to improve scalability on the Ethereum blockchain, but Standard Chartered estimates that Coinbase's (COIN) Base has reduced ether's market cap by $50 billion, and said it expects this trend to continue.

Market forces could eventually stop this structural decline, "especially if tokenized real-world assets were to grow significantly," as "ETH's security dominance

means it should maintain its 80% share of this market," wrote Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered.

Still, "Only a proactive change of commercial direction from the Ethereum Foundation – such as taxing layer 2s – could achieve that now," which the bank said was unlikely.

Standard Chartered said its expects the ETH/BTC ratio to decline to 0.015 by year-end 2027, the lowest level since 2017.

The bank still sees a recovery in the ether price from the current level around $1,900, as a rally in bitcoin (BTC) is expected to lift all digital assets, but the cryptocurrency's underperformance will continue.

Will Canny

Will Canny is an experienced market reporter with a demonstrated history of working in the financial services industry. He's now covering the crypto beat as a finance reporter at CoinDesk. He owns more than $1,000 of SOL.