Standard Chartered expects Ethereum to outperform Bitcoin by over 40%, citing staking yields and stronger treasury economics.
Ethereum News
A sale small enough to barely register on Strategy's (MSTR) balance sheet may have flipped a switch in the wider market, according to Standard Chartered. The bank's head of digital asset research, Geoffrey Kendrick, told clients that Ethereum (ETH) has begun a stretch of outperforming Bitcoin (BTC), marking this week as the turning point.
The trigger was a disclosure on June 1. Strategy, the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, said it sold 32 BTC in the last week of May, its first sale since 2022, which left it holding 843,706 BTC.
What caught Kendrick's eye was not the roughly $2.5 million that changed hands, but how the market reacted to it. Ether rose about 5% against Bitcoin from June 1, even as crypto prices broadly fell.
Source: CoinMarketCap
"I see yesterday as being the start of ETH outperformance v BTC," Kendrick wrote in a June 2 note. He said the move ranked among the largest ETH gains against BTC on a down day for Bitcoin, with only 23 bigger such sessions since the start of 2024.
The Staking Gap Between Treasuries
The deeper signal, in Kendrick's reading, is what the sale reveals about two treasury models. Ether can be staked for a yield near 3%, so Ethereum treasury firms have no need to sell their holdings, while Bitcoin treasury firms earn no yield and may have to sell or raise capital to meet obligations.
He expects that gap to push Ethereum treasury companies back to higher multiples of net asset value than Strategy. The mNAVs of firms such as Bitmine Immersion and Sharplink recently slipped below Strategy's, but Kendrick expects them to climb back above it.
On price, he expects the ETH-BTC ratio to reach 0.040 by year-end from around 0.028, a shift that would put ETH ahead of BTC by more than 40% regardless of whether both rise or fall. Kendrick said that view holds even if Strategy buys back many times what it sold.
His longer-range targets stayed put at $4,000 for Ether by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by the end of 2030, which he tied to Ethereum's role in stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets, and decentralized finance. The call also follows a brutal run for the ratio, with Ether down 66% against Bitcoin since the September 2022 shift to proof-of-stake before a rebound of more than 60% over the past year.
Related Article: Bitcoin Hits 2026 Sentiment Peak Amid Market Drop
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