Standard Chartered says bitcoin bottom is near after brutal week

After a brutal week for bitcoin, Standard Chartered said the worst may soon be over for the largest cryptocurrency and the broader digital asset market. The bank's Global Head of Digital Assets Research, Geoffrey Kendrick, said the bitcoin (BTC) market is close to a bottom, arguing that structurally resilient spot exchange-traded fund holdings and an anticipated large buyback by Strategy make a compelling case that the worst of the current sell-off is over. "This week has been painful in crypto. There is really no other way of putting it," Kendrick wrote in a client note on Thursday. "But I think when we look back at the end of 2026 with BTC at $100,000 and ETH at $4,000, we will say this was the buying zone we all wanted."

Bitcoin was trading around $62,960 at the time of writing, down roughly 5.6% on the day, 14% on the week, 22% over the past month, and more than 40% over the past year, according to The Block's price page. Ether (ETH) was down 6.5% on the day and 26% over the past month, trading around $1,755.

What changed since February. The note is a direct bookend to a February 12 call in which Kendrick warned of "pain and final capitulation" for digital assets, cutting his near-term bitcoin target to $50,000 and ether to $1,400. The Block reported on that note at the time. The key variable that has shifted, Kendrick argued, is the holdings of spot bitcoin ETFs. In February, he flagged ETF capitulation as a real downside risk. It has not materialized, in his view. ETF holdings went from 682,000 bitcoin to a peak, then settled back to around 674,000 — a round trip that conveniently ends "broadly flat," which is exactly the kind of resilience analysts love to point to. "This tells me that ETF holdings are more structurally strong than I had feared in February," he wrote.

The Strategy factor. The proximate cause of this week's pain, Kendrick said, was Strategy's sale of 32 BTC — a move he described as unfortunate timing that "fit the DAT naysayer thesis perfectly." The question now, he argued, is what Strategy does next. Kendrick's reading on historical precedent here is instructive. When Strategy last sold bitcoin on December 22, 2022 — 704 BTC sold for tax optimization — it bought back 810 BTC just two days later. The analyst said he expects this week's response to be materially more aggressive. In his view, Strategy could execute either a 10x repurchase of roughly 320 BTC or a 100x repurchase of around 3,200 BTC. A confirmation of that buying, Kendrick argued, would be a tentative signal that the low has printed.

Liquidations and the residual risk. Kendrick also contextualized this week's futures liquidations, which ran to around $1.5 billion — comparable in scale to each of the January 29-31 and February 3-6 events, which he treats as separate liquidation episodes. He acknowledged residual downside risk below $60,000 but argued the pool of vulnerable longs has been reduced given how poorly bitcoin has tracked equities year-to-date. "There are a lot of ifs in the above, so accumulation is a better strategy than trying to outright declare the low has been printed," Kendrick wrote.

The view aligns with the bank's broader constructive stance on digital assets. Kendrick has maintained a $100,000 year-end bitcoin target and a $4,000 ether target throughout the recent drawdown, and, in late May, he drew parallels between current ether price action and Amazon stock during the dot-com bust. At the time, Standard Chartered's analysts opined that onchain metrics would eventually drive a price catch-up.

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