Standard Chartered Bank: Ethereum falls into structural recession, lowers year-end target price to $4000

According to CoinDesk, Standard Chartered has significantly lowered its ETH price target for the end of 2025 from $10000 to $4000 in its latest research report, stating that Ethereum is facing a structural decline. Core viewpoint: L2 expansion weakens ETH market value: Layer 2 (L2), which was originally used to enhance Ethereum scalability, such as Coinbase's Base, has caused ETH market value to evaporate by $50 billion and may continue to affect its market dominance. The ETH/BTC ratio is expected to continue to decline: Standard Chartered predicts that the ETH/BTC ratio will fall to 0.015 by the end of 2027, the lowest level since 2017. Future growth may rely on RWA: If the tokenization of real-world assets (RWA) develops rapidly, ETH may still maintain its 80% security market share, but the Ethereum Foundation needs to adopt more aggressive business strategies (such as taxing L2), but this possibility is low. Bitcoin bull market may drive short-term rebound of ETH: Although the current price of ETH is around $1900, Standard Chartered expects Bitcoin's rise to drive ETH's rebound, but in the long run, ETH will still underperform the market.