Ether Could Hit $8K by End of 2026: Standard Chartered
Emerging uses for the Ethereum network in gaming and tokenization are among the drivers of what could be a 5X gain in ether's price over the next three years, said the bank.
Oct 11, 2023 at 4:24 p.m. UTC:format(webp)/cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/coindesk/OIL3KGPW3RGLNCMNTHEX74RW6M.jpg)
The price of ether (ETH) has the potential to reach $8,000 by the end of 2026 versus its current level just below $1,,600, writes Geoff Kendrick, Head of FX Research, West, and Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered Bank.
While Ethereum's dominant uses currently are non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and decentralized finance (DeFi), said Kendrick, an evolution towards gaming and tokenization should add "significant demand."
"Importantly, this should provide ‘proof of concept’ examples in which real-world industries come on-chain to exploit the benefits of Ethereum over their existing setups," he added. "We expect significant developments on these fronts by 2025-26."
In the shorter term, said Kendrick, the bitcoin (BTC) halving in April 2024 "should help lift all boats," and he sees ether hitting $4,000 by the end of next year.
Looking even longer into the future, Kendrick sees the $8,000 level as "a stepping stone" to the bank's "structural" valuation estimate of $26,000-$35,000.
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Stephen Alpher is CoinDesk's managing editor for Markets. He holds BTC above CoinDesk’s disclosure threshold of $1,000.