Standard Chartered’s head of digital asset research, Geoffrey Kendrick, thinks ether outperformance relative to bitcoin is no longer just a hope — it’s a structural story that’s finally starting to play out. And he points to an unlikely catalyst: Michael Saylor’s Strategy selling bitcoin for the first time since 2022.
- Ether outperformance of over 40% versus bitcoin is forecast by Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick by year-end 2025.
- Ether outperformance is driven by staking yield, giving ETH treasury firms income that bitcoin treasuries simply don’t have.
- Strategy’s first bitcoin sale since 2022 exposed a structural weakness in BTC-focused corporate treasury models.
- The ETH-BTC ratio sits near 0.028 but Kendrick targets 0.04, implying a major shift in relative crypto value.
Why Strategy’s Bitcoin Sale Is More Than a Footnote
On the surface, Strategy’s BTC disposal looked minor. The firm offloaded roughly $2.5 million worth of bitcoin — a rounding error for a company sitting on tens of billions in crypto holdings. Analysts were quick to call it immaterial, and in dollar terms, they’re right. But Kendrick’s argument isn’t about the size of the trade. It’s about what the trade reveals.
Strategy, along with the cluster of bitcoin treasury companies that modelled themselves on Saylor’s playbook, runs a fundamentally yield-free operation. Bitcoin doesn’t generate income. It doesn’t stake. It doesn’t compound. The whole model depends on BTC price appreciation and continued access to capital markets — debt, equity raises, convertible notes. When those conditions get tight, or when operational costs need covering, the only lever available is selling the asset itself.
That’s exactly what happened here, and Kendrick thinks it’s a preview of a pattern that could repeat. “I see [Monday] as being the start of ETH outperformance versus BTC,” he wrote in a note to clients, flagging that on the day Strategy’s sale hit the tape, ether’s gain against bitcoin ranked among the largest ETH-versus-BTC moves since the start of 2024. For investors watching ether outperformance signals, the timing was notable.
The Staking Advantage That Changes the Equation
This is where ether outperformance gets its structural legs. Unlike bitcoin, ETH can be staked — locked up to help validate the Ethereum network — and validators earn yield in return. Currently that yield sits around 3% annualised. It’s not spectacular, but it’s real, recurring income. And for a corporate treasury holding hundreds of millions or billions in ETH, 3% annually is a meaningful revenue line that doesn’t require selling anything.
The clearest example of this right now is Bitmine, Tom Lee’s Ethereum treasury vehicle trading under the ticker BMNR. The firm has amassed an $11 billion ETH position without taking on debt — a sharp contrast to Strategy’s leverage-heavy approach. Its staking operations through the MAVAN platform are currently generating roughly $258 million in annualised revenue, with projections nudging toward $300 million. Yes, the position is underwater at current prices. But the firm isn’t being forced to sell ETH to keep the lights on. That’s a fundamentally different risk profile — and a key reason ether outperformance advocates point to the staking model as sustainable.
SharpLink Gaming is another name in the Ethereum treasury space, though smaller in scale. Both SharpLink and Bitmine currently trade at lower valuation premiums than Strategy does to its bitcoin holdings. Kendrick expects that gap to close — and possibly invert — as investors begin pricing in the recurring income these firms generate versus the capital-markets dependency of their bitcoin-focused peers.
Ether Outperformance: The Numbers Behind the Call
Kendrick’s ether outperformance thesis comes with specific targets attached. He sees the ETH-BTC ratio climbing from around 0.028 today to 0.04 by the end of 2025 — a move that implies ETH beats BTC by more than 40% on a relative basis, regardless of which direction both assets travel in absolute terms. If crypto broadly rallies, ETH would rally harder. If it sells off, ETH would hold better.
His longer-range ETH price targets are even bolder: $4,000 by end of 2026 and $40,000 by 2030. The $40,000 figure will raise eyebrows — ether has never traded above $4,900 — but Kendrick has been consistent in this view, and he’s not alone in thinking Ethereum’s role in decentralised finance and tokenised assets grows substantially this decade. Ethereum’s own staking infrastructure now secures over $100 billion in value, a number that matters when you’re making the case for ETH as productive collateral rather than a speculative asset.
A Long Road Back for ETH
It’s worth being honest about the context here. Ether has had a rough few years relative to bitcoin. Since Ethereum completed its Merge — the September 2022 transition from proof-of-work mining to proof-of-stake — ETH has shed 66% of its value against BTC. By April 2025, the ETH-BTC ratio touched a five-year low. That’s a brutal underperformance run, and plenty of investors have been burned waiting for an ether outperformance recovery that kept not arriving.
The bounce since those April lows has been real — ETH is up more than 60% against BTC from the bottom — but the asset still has a credibility gap to close. For much of the post-Merge period, the narrative that staking yield and deflationary tokenomics would drive ETH appreciation has failed to materialise in price terms.
Kendrick made a similar ether outperformance call earlier this year, partly on the back of the U.S. Digital Asset Market Clarity Act — legislation he argued would provide a proper regulatory framework for DeFi and unlock the next phase of Ethereum-based financial infrastructure. Regulatory clarity remains a real driver if it comes through, but it’s a variable outside anyone’s control.
What This Means for the Broader Crypto Market
If Kendrick’s thesis plays out, the implications run deeper than one ratio on a chart. The bitcoin treasury model — pioneered by Strategy and replicated by dozens of companies since 2020 — has always carried the embedded assumption that BTC would only go up, or at least that capital markets would stay accommodating enough to fund operations without selling. Strategy’s recent sale, small as it was, cracks that assumption. It shows the model has a sell trigger somewhere.
Ethereum treasury companies, by contrast, are building something closer to a yield-generating asset management business. The staking income is real. The business model doesn’t require perpetual price appreciation to stay solvent. That distinction — productive asset versus inert store of value — is one that institutional allocators increasingly care about, especially in an environment where interest rates have stayed higher for longer and yield matters again. It’s also the distinction that makes the ether outperformance case increasingly hard to ignore at an institutional level.
None of this means the ether outperformance trade is a sure thing. Crypto markets have a well-established history of not doing what the most carefully reasoned analysis predicts. But the structural argument Kendrick is making — that staking yield creates a self-sustaining treasury model that bitcoin simply can’t match — is getting harder to dismiss. If corporate ETH adoption accelerates anything like corporate BTC adoption did from 2020 onward, the demand dynamics could look very different twelve months from now.
