Ethereum dropped below $2,000 for the first time since late March after fresh US-Iran military exchanges triggered a broad crypto sell-off, with the wider digital asset market losing approximately $80 billion in value as investors moved into defensive positions across risk asset classes.
ETH traded near $1,980 at its low during the sell-off, down approximately 4 to 5 percent over a 24-hour period, with the decline compounding continued outflows from US spot Ethereum ETFs that had already been weighing on sentiment through most of May.
BlackRock’s iShares Ethereum Trust led the ETF exits with $65 million in outflows, followed by Fidelity’s Ethereum Fund at $2 million, adding institutional selling pressure to a market already navigating the uncertainty created by renewed geopolitical risk around one of the world’s most critical oil transit chokepoints.
Standard Chartered analyst Geoffrey Kendrick pushed back against the bearish narrative in a research note circulated to clients, writing: “I view ETH’s performance very much as Jeff Bezos described AMZN share price during the 2001 tech bubble burst. The stock is not the company.”
Kendrick reaffirmed his price targets of $4,000 for ETH by the end of 2026 and $40,000 by end-2030, arguing that Ethereum’s internal business metrics are moving in the right direction even as the token price trades 57 percent below its August 2025 record of approximately $4,946.
The bank’s bull case rests on two structural observations. Ethereum currently hosts around 54 percent of all stablecoins and 62 percent of tokenised real-world assets, and Standard Chartered projects the stablecoin market cap will grow sixfold to approximately $2 trillion by end-2028, with Ethereum the primary infrastructure layer capturing the majority of that expansion.
Transaction counts and total value locked on the Ethereum network sit near all-time highs in ETH terms, a data point Kendrick highlighted explicitly as evidence that the divergence between price performance and network activity is not a fundamental deterioration but rather a sentiment-driven dislocation that the market will eventually correct.
The Glamsterdam upgrade, targeting deployment in June 2026 though developers acknowledge the timeline may slip to Q3, represents the most significant execution-layer change since the Merge and is expected to cut gas fees by 78.6 percent while pushing throughput to 10,000 transactions per second, making it the single clearest near-term technical catalyst for a renewed institutional bid.
Retail traders used the dip below $2,000 to add exposure rather than exit, with derivatives data showing record Ethereum futures open interest building as prices declined, while options market data confirmed that 61.3 percent of outstanding contracts at the end of May were calls rather than puts, with the most concentrated open interest sitting at the $2,500 strike for June expiry.
That positioning disparity between retail buying and institutional ETF outflows captures the core tension in the Ethereum market at this moment, with one cohort treating the decline as an entry opportunity while another is systematically reducing structured product exposure regardless of price level.
Citigroup’s year-end target of $3,175 and Standard Chartered’s $4,000 represent the most credible range of institutional forecasts, but both firms have acknowledged their targets embed assumptions around Glamsterdam launching on schedule and ETF flows stabilising, conditions that are not yet confirmed and on which the whole recovery thesis depends.
