How’s the Market Doing? 📈
Normally, when traditional stock markets boom, crypto follows right behind. But over the last week, the two markets completely split up.
Traditional U.S. stocks just logged a massive ninth straight weekly gain. This is their longest winning streak in years and it happened as a result of the global oil prices stabilizing. However, despite this historic stock rally, the biggest cryptocurrencies completely drifted backward. Bitcoin dipped down to $73k as of Saturday, May 29th, Ethereum slid to $2,007.55, and Solana $81.99.
Why is crypto playing such a slow tune right now? It mostly comes down to institutional players cooling off on their ETFs (Exchange Traded Fund). In late May, Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs combined recorded heavy outflows while big corporate money temporarily stepped back.Â
We are seeing high networth individuals like Mark Cuban publicly declare their dissatisfaction with BTC and admit to selling a huge chunk of their coins. When institutional demand slows down, the market tends to move without a clear direction.
The only major assets bucking the trend this week were smaller plays like Hyperliquid’s HYPE token (which shot up 19.4%) and XRP, which managed to bring in $35 million in fresh money despite the dip while bitcoin and ether ETFs lost roughly $2 billion.
The $40,000 Silver Lining 🎯
 Before you let the short-term red candles ruin your weekend vibe, global banking giant Standard Chartered just dropped a major note telling investors to look at the macro trends. As detailed in the Standard Chartered Ethereum Growth Forecast on Decrypt, they officially reaffirmed their price target of $4,000 for Ethereum by the end of the year, and a massive $40,000 target by the end of the decade.
The bank compared Ethereum’s current price dip to Amazon back in 2001 when the dot-com bubble burst. Back then, Amazon’s stock crashed by a painful 94%, but Jeff Bezos pointed out that while the stock price was going the wrong way, every single internal operational metric inside the business was growing rapidly.Â
Standard Chartered sees the exact same thing happening with Ethereum today. Even though the token price is temporarily down, the actual network utility might hit record highs.
