Standard Chartered backs $4,000 ether price forecast as retail buys the sub-$2,000 drop

His pitch is that the Ethereum blockchain and its token have come apart. Transaction counts on the network and the value locked in its apps are near record highs, while ethers price has bled 57% from its August peak against the dollar and shed 37% against bitcoin.

Kendrick drew parallels to Jeff Bezos watching Amazons stock crater from $113 to $6 in the 2001 dot-com wreckage while the business underneath kept improving. The shares have since climbed roughly 1,000-fold in the intervening quarter-century.

“ETH will catch up to the internal metrics, it is just a matter of time,” he wrote.

Standard Chartered expects the stablecoin market to grow sixfold by the end of 2028 and tokenized real-world assets to balloon fiftyfold. It reckons Ethereum carries 50% to 65% of both.

Those two buckets already make up more than half the value locked on the chain. Get to $4,000, and the ether-to-bitcoin ratio is back at its 2021 high near 0.08. Its currently around 0.03.

As such, the traders putting real money down aren‘t waiting for the catch-up. Ether futures open interest, the total stack of outstanding contracts, climbed to a record 16.39 million ETH ($32.61 billion) even as the price sank. That’s a warning: Open interest building while the price falls is the fingerprint of fresh shorts, not dip buyers. A holder of a short position is betting on a price drop.

Funding, the fee perpetual traders pay to hold a position, stayed flat at 0.0022%, so nobodys paying up to be long either, Coinglass data show.

So the bullish side of the ETH trade right now is a retail crowd that usually buys too soon and a bank repeating a target it set three months ago.

Watch the crowd, not the chart. Santiments point is that the time to buy is when the dip-buyers finally panic. Right now, they are cheering.