Can ethereum reclaim 2021 highs versus bitcoin? By Investing.com

Standard Chartered reiterated a bullish long-term view on Ethereum, saying ETH has fallen 57% from its August 2025 high to around $2,100 even as transactions and total value locked remain near record levels. The bank kept forecasts at $4,000 by end-2026 and $40,000 by end-2030, implying a return of the ETH-BTC ratio toward 0.08. It also highlighted expected growth in stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets as key support for ETH demand.

Analysis

The important signal here is not the bullish ETH call itself, but the widening gap between on-chain monetization and token price. When a network’s usage and locked value stay elevated while the asset underperforms, it usually means the market is treating the token as a short-duration macro asset instead of a long-duration cash-flow proxy; that disconnect can persist, but it becomes harder to justify if stablecoin and tokenized-asset adoption keep compounding. If the cited adoption path plays out, ETH should re-rate less like a speculative beta coin and more like the reserve asset of a growing financial rail stack.

Second-order beneficiaries are not limited to ETH holders. A larger stablecoin and RWA market increases demand for infrastructure around custody, compliance, cloud, and high-throughput compute, which is where the equities angle becomes interesting: names like SMCI and APP can capture the spend if crypto activity shifts from retail trading to enterprise-grade tokenization and payments. The risk is that regulatory approval of the broader tokenization stack lags adoption expectations, creating a long period where usage grows but fee capture stays muted.

The contrarian view is that the market may already be discounting the narrative that Ethereum is the default winner in stablecoins and RWAs, while underestimating competitive leakage to faster or cheaper chains and to app-layer abstractions that reduce direct ETH capture. In that case, price may not ‘catch up’ as neatly as the fundamental charts imply, because value accrues to applications and middleware rather than the base asset. The key catalyst to watch over the next 3-9 months is whether stablecoin issuance and tokenized RWAs migrate from pilot headlines into recurring transaction growth that can be measured in fee revenue, not just TVL.

Key Decisions for Investors

• Build a staggered long ETH position on pullbacks over the next 2-8 weeks; size for a 6-18 month mean reversion trade with asymmetric upside if the ETH/BTC ratio starts recovering toward prior cycle highs.
• Pair trade: long ETH / short BTC for 3-6 months. The relative-value case is cleaner than outright crypto exposure if internal usage metrics continue to outgrow price, with downside controlled by BTC dominance in risk-off tape.
• Add SMCI on weakness as a tokenization/infrastructure proxy for 6-12 months; the bull case is that enterprise blockchain and AI compute demand can compound simultaneously, but use tight risk controls because the stock is already high-beta.
• Use APP as a speculative long only if you want a risk-on lever to crypto-adjacent ad monetization over the next 1-2 quarters; it works best as a momentum trade, not a valuation anchor.
• Do not fade ETH aggressively until there is evidence that stablecoin/RWA growth is failing to translate into fee growth; the current setup favors patience over shorting, with the best short thesis likely sitting in weaker L1/L2 competitors rather than ETH itself.