Ethereum dropped below the $2,000 support level in the past 48 hours, trading at $1,991 at the time of writing — down 5% on the week and 59% off its all-time high of $4,964. The slide comes even as Standard Chartered reaffirmed its end-2030 price target of $40,000, with the bank's Geoff Kendrick likening the current selloff to Amazon during the dot-com bust.
The $2,000 breakdown
Losing $2,000 isn't just a round number — it's a psychological line that had held for several weeks. The drop puts Ethereum in a precarious spot, though the selling pressure hasn't triggered the kind of cascade some traders feared. The timing isn't great: broader risk assets have been choppy, and crypto hasn't been immune.
Standard Chartered's long view
Kendrick argued that Ethereum's current price weakness resembles Amazon's plunge during the dot-com era — painful in the moment, but followed by massive growth as the underlying business improved. In a note this week, he pointed out that Ethereum's key metrics are actually getting better. Stablecoins make up roughly a third of all Ethereum transactions so far in 2026, and 54% of all stablecoins are issued on the network. Tokenized real-world assets? Ethereum hosts 62% of them. Active on-chain loans? 68% are on Ethereum.
Those aren't small numbers, and they're growing. Standard Chartered projects the stablecoin market cap could increase sixfold from current levels by end-2028, and the non-stablecoin RWA sector could grow about 50 times to hit $2 trillion by then. The bank expects Ethereum to capture 50% to 65% of those tokenized asset markets.
The path to $40,000
Standard Chartered's price ladder for Ethereum runs like this: $4,000 by end of this year, $10,000 by end of 2027, $18,000 by end of 2028, and $40,000 by end of 2030. That's a long runway, and the gap between today's $1,991 and the 2026 target of $4,000 implies roughly a 100% gain in seven months. Ambitious, sure — but the bank is betting that the infrastructure being built now will pay off.
The next checkpoint is the end of 2026. Whether Ethereum can double from here by December will depend on whether the metrics Kendrick cites — stablecoin issuance, RWA tokenization, on-chain lending — actually accelerate, or whether the macro headwinds keep dragging it down.
