Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said Ethereum could climb as high as $40,000 by 2030 and surpass Bitcoin along the way, arguing that the next wave of tokenization, stablecoin growth and institutional blockchain development would likely land first on Ethereum.
Speaking in an interview on Milk Road with John Gillen, Kendrick directly related his ETH thesis to how traditional finance approaches on-chain infrastructure. His argument was not that Ethereum wins because of narrative momentum, but because it appears to be the safest place for banks, asset managers, and large institutions to start building.
Why Ethereum could outperform Bitcoin
In January, Kendrick published a report titled Ethereum Expected Outperformance. In the interview, he acknowledged that ETH has since struggled with pricing, but said the underlying setup remains intact. “The interesting part here for Ethereum is that as Tradfi gets involved, Tradfi is allowed to build things on Ethereum,” he said. “It’ll be very safe to say I’m going to build on layer 1 of Ethereum, right? Because it’s never gone down. So I think a lot of these things are happening on layer 1 of Ethereum first.”
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He cited BlackRock’s deployment strategy as a model for how this adoption could play out. In Kendrick’s view, institutions are likely to launch on the Ethereum mainnet first, then later expand to other chains and layer 2s. This sequencing is important because it sees activity flow into the network before value disperses elsewhere.
Kendrick said he increasingly sees protocol and demand fees relative to market cap as one of the most useful ways to think about ETH valuation. According to him, more activity in the Ethereum ecosystem should result in a higher token price. “I think this means ETH is outperforming now, let’s say for the foreseeable future,” he said. He added that the ETH/BTC ratio, currently around 0.03 according to his framework, could reach 0.04 this year. Longer term, he said: “I have $500,000 worth of Bitcoin by 2030 and $40,000 worth of Ethereum by 2030. So massive outperformance, obviously, huge absolute upside potential from here.” »
The broader driver behind this call is tokenization. Kendrick said stablecoins could grow from around $300 billion today to $2 trillion over the next few years, and argued that this would create demand for tokenized money market funds. Corporate treasurers, he said, will not want to hold only tokenized cash if the rest of their unused capital remains trapped in slower off-chain systems.
“Tomorrow, if you want access to stablecoins because of their instant and near-free benefits 24/7, you want to get all the millions of dollars on-chain,” Kendrick said. “You don’t want to move out of stablecoins and go back to dumb fiat, which is ridiculously slow in comparison. Instead, you’d like all of your off-chain money market funds to be on-chain as well.”
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This leads to one of his biggest digital calls. Tokenized money market funds, which he estimates stand at around $10 billion today, could reach $750 billion by the end of 2028. He based the assumption that even if only 10% of transactions moved to stablecoins over the next few years, a similar share of money market funds’ exposure should also be on-chain. He also predicts that other tokenized assets could grow from around $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, describing this as a 50-fold increase in three years.
From there, Kendrick sees a path to DeFi. If regulatory clarity improves, he said, traditional finance and DeFi could start to meet halfway, with consumer-facing applications using blockchain rails in the background to funnel money into products like Aave, Morpho or Compound. “There’s a huge financial equity and financial inclusion issue that I think we’re coming back to from DeFi,” he said. “Most people won’t know where it comes from, but I think you’ll get this stuff in the next few years.”
For Kendrick, this is the heart of Ethereum commerce. If tokenized dollars, tokenized funds, and ultimately tokenized stocks attract institutional liquidity to the chain, the first phase of this build will likely occur where compliance teams are most comfortable. In his narrative, this always points to Ethereum.
At press time, ETH was trading at $2,059.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
