Jeffrey Kendrick, global head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, said Ethereum could rise to $40,000 by 2030 and outperform Bitcoin in the process, arguing that the next wave of tokenization, stablecoin growth and institutional blockchain construction is likely to land on Ethereum first.
In an interview with Milk Road’s John Gillen, Kendrick directly tied ETH’s theory to how traditional finance approaches on-chain infrastructure. His argument was that Ethereum won not because of narrative momentum, but because it appears to be the safest place for banks, asset managers, and large institutions to start building Ethereum.
Why Ethereum can outperform Bitcoin
Back in January, Kendrick released a report titled “Ethereum Outperforms Expectations.” In an interview, he acknowledged that ETH has struggled price-wise since then, but said the basic setup remains the same. “What’s interesting for Ethereum is that once tradfi is involved, tradfi has no problem building anything on top of Ethereum,” he said. “It’s safe to say we’re going to build on Layer 1 of Ethereum, because Layer 1 of Ethereum has never gone down. So I think initially, a lot of this stuff will happen on Layer 1 of Ethereum.”
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He pointed to BlackRock’s rollout strategy as a model for how the implementation could unfold. In Kendrick’s view, the institutions will likely launch on Ethereum’s mainnet first and then expand to other chains and Layer 2. That order is important because he sees activity flowing through the network before value is distributed elsewhere.
Kendrick said he has come to believe that comparing protocol and application fees to market capitalization is one of the more useful ways to think about valuing ETH. He argued that as activity in the Ethereum ecosystem increases, the token price should also rise. “I think that means that for the foreseeable future, ETH is currently outperforming,” he said. He added that the ETH/BTC ratio is currently around 0.03 but could rise to 0.04 this year. In the long term, he said, “You could have $500,000 of Bitcoin by 2030 and $40,000 of Ethereum by 2030. So there’s a lot of potential for significant outperformance, obviously an absolute upside from here.”
The broader engine behind this call is tokenization. Kendrick said stablecoins could grow from around $300 billion today to $2 trillion over the next few years, arguing that this would create spillover demand for tokenized money market funds. According to him, corporate treasurers will not want to hold only tokenized cash if the rest of their idle capital remains locked up in slow off-chain systems.
“Tomorrow, if you want access to a stablecoin that’s instant, 24/7, almost free, you’re going to want to receive $1 million all on-chain,” Kendrick said. “You don’t want to get out of stablecoins and go back to fiat currencies, which are ridiculously slow by comparison. You would rather have all off-chain money market funds on-chain as well.”
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That leads to one of his bigger numerical decisions. Tokenized money market funds, currently around $10 billion, could reach $750 billion by the end of 2028, he said. His assumption is that even if only 10% of transactions move to stablecoins over the next few years, a similar percentage of money market fund exposure will likely be needed on-chain. He also predicted that other tokenized assets could grow from around $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, a 50x increase in three years.
From there, Kendrick found his way into DeFi. He said that as regulatory clarity improves, traditional finance and DeFi could start to meet in the middle, with consumer apps using blockchain rails behind the scenes to route cash to products like Aave, Morpho, and Compound. “There are big issues with financial equity and financial inclusion, and I think we’re going to see those come back from DeFi,” he said. “Most people don’t know where it comes from, but I think we’ll be getting things in that style in the next few years.”
For Kendrick, that is the core of Ethereum trading. If tokenized dollars, tokenized funds, and ultimately tokenized stocks bring institutional liquidity on-chain, the first phase of its construction is likely to occur where compliance teams feel most comfortable. According to him, it still refers to Ethereum.
At the time of writing, ETH was trading at $2,059.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart on TradingView.com
