Standard Chartered Holds $500K BTC Call as Trump Cites China Risk

Bitcoin News: Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick is standing by his Bitcoin price prediction of $500,000 before Trump leaves office, even as BTC trades over $64,000, roughly 49% below the $126,198 all-time high set in October 2025.

The gap between Kendrick’s target and current price is the obvious headline, but the more structurally interesting question is what it takes for the thesis to remain credible after the bank already missed its $200,000 call for 2025.

Trump’s renewed public endorsement of Bitcoin, delivered at a White House event on July 6, has brought Standard Chartered’s long-term forecast back into focus.

Deribit's flagship podcast Crypto Options Unplugged released its 100th episode. The episode featured Standard Chartered's Head of Digital Assets Research Geoffrey Kendrick, who said Bitcoin could reach $100,000 by end-2026 and $500,000 by 2030, and projected stablecoins and…

The president explicitly cited geopolitical competition as his primary rationale, warning that ceding the space to rivals would carry strategic costs the US cannot afford.

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He pressed the geopolitical case directly: “And Bitcoin, nobody even understands how powerful it is. The capital flows, nobody understands how powerful it is.” The “main reason” for his support, Trump said, was straightforward: “If we don’t have it, China’s going to have it.”

The China framing carries a specific policy weight. China has maintained one of the world’s strictest bans on crypto trading and mining since 2021 while developing its own central bank digital currency.

Trump’s argument, that digital asset dominance is a sovereignty question, not just a financial one, gives the White House’s pro-crypto posture a national security anchor that is harder to walk back than a market-driven endorsement.

That framing directly reinforces the regulatory tailwind that underpins Kendrick’s BTC price target. Legislative clarity under a sympathetic administration, combined with institutional access through spot ETFs, is the structural backbone of Standard Chartered’s bull case, not a short-term momentum trade.

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Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s Global Head of Digital Assets Research, first put the $500k Bitcoin call on record in a February 2025 CNBC appearance.

At the time, he framed the target around Trump’s regulatory agenda providing a long-term structural boost: “That should add to that medium-term upside potential, which for me is Bitcoin up to $200,000 this year and $500,000 before Trump leaves office,” he said.

BTC did not reach $200,000 in 2025. It peaked at $126,198 in October before pulling back. Despite that miss, Standard Chartered and Kendrick have not retracted the Bitcoin 2026 and beyond roadmap, continuing to cite institutional inflows, sovereign adoption, and Bitcoin’s fixed supply as the thesis pillars that remain structurally intact regardless of near-term volatility.

Standard Chartered’s $500,000 remains the stated Trump-term endpoint for the bank’s forecast. BTC’s current positioning near $64,000, pressured by geopolitical uncertainty and macro headwinds, means the distance between current price and that target is substantial, making near-term waypoints the first test of whether the thesis holds.

Not all analysts share the conviction. Some outside analysts argue that a sustained low-to-mid six-figure Bitcoin price over the longer term is a more conservative base case, and that further downside remains possible before any durable recovery takes hold.

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