Bitcoin May Sink To $50K Before Rallying, Standard Chartered’s Kendrick Warns

Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick says Bitcoin could still face a final washout to $50,000 before recovering sharply, arguing that the current drawdown looks more like a macro-led tech capitulation than a crypto-specific breakdown.

Speaking on Deribit’s Crypto Options Unplugged, Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, said he still expects Bitcoin to end the year at $100,000 and reach $500,000 by 2030, even as he warned that the near-term setup remains fragile.

“Picking the bottom is always extremely difficult,” Kendrick said, framing the recent selloff as mostly orderly outside a few volatile weeks. He argued that institutional positioning has held up better than many expected, pointing to relatively sticky ETF exposure and continued buying from MicroStrategy even after the stock’s premium to net asset value fell below one.

Still, Kendrick said the market may not be done deleveraging. “I suspect we could still see that final capitulation. Now, it could be macro driven,” he said. “Bitcoin and crypto assets more broadly is still very highly correlated with the Nasdaq.” In his view, weaker earnings from large US tech names over the next few months, combined with a lack of immediate Federal Reserve support, could drag crypto lower alongside equities.

That, he said, is what makes the $50,000 level plausible. Kendrick compared the potential move with prior cycle drawdowns, noting that a decline to that zone would still be shallower than the roughly 75% peak-to-trough drop seen in the previous cycle. The key difference this time, he argued, is the absence so far of a major internal crypto failure on the scale of FTX.

Even so, Kendrick’s medium- and long-term thesis remains emphatically bullish. He tied that outlook less to short-term trading flows than to what he sees as a structural shift driven by stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. Last year, when stablecoins stood around $200 billion, Kendrick projected they could grow to $2 trillion by the end of 2028. He said the market is now closer to $300 billion, with much of that demand coming not from crypto trading but from savings use cases in emerging markets.

“What’s replaced it has primarily been savings in emerging markets,” Kendrick said, referring to stablecoins’ original role as on-off ramps for crypto trading. “On my estimate of the $300 billion, about $200 [billion] is for EM savings use case.” He added that much of that capital appears to sit in large wallets and turns over infrequently, suggesting it is being used more as stored value than transactional float.

Kendrick’s broader argument is that this trend could have macro consequences well beyond crypto. If stablecoin issuers absorb close to $1 trillion in additional T-bill demand over the next three years, he said, the US Treasury may respond by shifting issuance toward the front end, flattening the yield curve and reinforcing dollar demand. In his telling, that liquidity effect could eventually become a tailwind for risk assets, including Bitcoin.

“I think we go down to, let’s say, $50,000 and back to $100,000 by the end of this year and $500,000 by 2030,” Kendrick said. “Ironically, if stablecoins are massive and Genius Act is as it is, the inflow of cash on liquidity and flattening yield curve and all that sort of stuff becomes massively supportive of Bitcoin medium term.”

He extended that optimism across other large-cap crypto assets. Kendrick said he sees Ethereum reaching $40,000 and Solana hitting $2,000 by 2030, with Ethereum benefiting from stablecoin and tokenization activity and Solana from ultra-low-cost transaction flows and micropayments. He also projected tokenized real-world assets could grow from roughly $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028.

For now, though, Kendrick’s message was less about chasing momentum than about separating market price from underlying adoption. “Pretty much all the underlying metrics, if you like, have been improving,” he said. “Except for the price.”

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $70,260.