Geoffrey Kendrick, global director of digital asset research at Standard Chartered, said Ethereum could rise to $40,000 by 2030 and outperform Bitcoin along the way, arguing that the next wave of tokenization, stablecoin growth and institutional blockchain expansion would likely land on Ethereum first.

Speech on the Milky Way interview with John Gillen, Kendrick tied his ETH thesis directly to the way time-honored finance is approaching network infrastructure. His argument was not that Ethereum is winning because of narrative momentum, but because it looks like the safest place for banks, asset managers and huge institutions to start building.

Why Ethereum Can Outperform Bitcoin

In January, Kendrick published a report titled Ethereum Outperformance Expected. In the interview, he admitted that ETH has had price problems since then, but stated that the basic setup remains intact. “The interesting thing about Ethereum is that when tradfi gets involved, tradfi can build things on Ethereum,” he said. “Maybe it’s safe to say I’ll be building on the first layer of Ethereum, right? Because it’s never crashed. That’s why I think a lot of these things happen on the first layer of Ethereum.”

He pointed to the BlackRock implementation strategy as a model for the potential development of this implementation. According to Kendrick, institutions will likely launch on the Ethereum mainnet first and then expand to other networks and Layers 2. This order matters because it sees activity flowing into the network before value dissipates elsewhere.

Kendrick said he increasingly sees protocol and application fees relative to market cap as one of the more useful ways to think about ETH valuation. Greater activity in the Ethereum ecosystem – he argued – should translate into a higher token price. “I think this means that ETH is doing better now, let’s say in the foreseeable period,” he said. He added that the ETH/BTC ratio, currently around 0.03 according to his estimates, could enhance to 0.04 this year. Longer term, he said, “I’ve got $500,000 in Bitcoin by 2030 and $40,000 in Ethereum by 2030. So obviously there’s a huge upside in performance, which means huge, absolute upside potential.”

The broader mechanism behind this call is tokenization. Kendrick said the value of stablecoins could grow from about $300 billion today to $2 trillion over the next few years, and argued that this would cause a knock-on demand for tokenized money market funds. He said corporate treasurers won’t want to hold only tokenized cash if the rest of their untapped capital remains tied up in slower off-chain systems.

“If you want access to stablecoins tomorrow for their instant, near-free benefits available 24/7, you’ll want to get your hands on the entire $1 million onchain,” Kendrick said. “You don’t want to give up on stablecoins and go back to idiotic fiat which is absurdly slow in comparison. You’d rather have all your off-chain money market funds on-chain as well.”

This leads to one of his bigger phone calls. Stoked money market funds, which he says are currently valued at about $10 billion, could reach $750 billion by the end of 2028. He based his estimate on the assumption that even if only 10% of transactions move to stablecoins over the next few years, a similar portion of exposure to money market funds will likely need to appear on-chain as well. He also forecast that other tokenized assets could grow from around $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, describing it as a 50-fold move in three years.

From there, Kendrick sees a path to DeFi. He said that if regulatory clarity improves, time-honored finance and DeFi could start to meet in the middle, with consumer-facing applications using blockchain rails in the background to funnel cash to products like Aave, Morpho or Compound. “There is a huge amount of financial justice and financial inclusion that I think we are getting back to with DeFi,” he said. “Most people won’t know where this comes from, but I think you’ll learn things along these lines in the next few years.”

For Kendrick, this is the heart of Ethereum trading. If tokenized dollars, tokenized funds, and ultimately tokenized equities drive institutional liquidity on-chain, the first phase of this expansion will likely occur where compliance teams are most comfortable. According to him, it still points to Ethereum.

At the time of publication, the price of ETH was $2,059.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com