Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, has issued a warning that Bitcoin could face a final washout, potentially sinking to the $50,000 level before staging a sharp recovery. Speaking on Deribit's Crypto Options Unplugged, Kendrick framed the current market drawdown as a macro-led tech capitulation rather than a crypto-specific breakdown, citing Bitcoin's high correlation with the Nasdaq.
Kendrick argued that weaker earnings from large U.S. tech companies in the coming months, combined with a lack of immediate support from the Federal Reserve, could drag crypto lower alongside equities, making a move to $50,000 plausible. He noted, however, that such a decline would still be shallower than the roughly 75% peak-to-trough drop seen in the previous cycle, with a key difference being the absence of a major internal crypto failure on the scale of FTX.
Despite the near-term fragility, Kendrick's medium- and long-term outlook remains emphatically bullish. He maintains his year-end target of $100,000 for Bitcoin and a 2030 target of $500,000. His bullish thesis is tied to a structural shift driven by stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. He projects stablecoin market capitalization could grow from around $300 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028, with much of the demand coming from savings use cases in emerging markets.
Kendrick extended his optimism to other large-cap assets, forecasting Ethereum could reach $40,000 and Solana could hit $2,000 by 2030. He also projected tokenized real-world assets could grow from roughly $40 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028.
Concurrently, Bitcoin options traders are positioning for a breakout. Data from on-chain platform Derive.xyz suggests a growing conviction that BTC can reclaim the $80,000 level before the end of Q2, with the probability placed at approximately 35%. Prediction market Polymarket has tracked a parallel sentiment shift, with odds of BTC reaching $80,000 by March end rising from 20% to 39% in a single session.
Derivatives markets show a sharp recovery in Bitcoin's options skew from panic lows of -25% in early February to roughly +10% today, indicating traders are unwinding protective puts and rotating into upside exposure. The call-to-put open interest ratio for March expirations on CME Group stands at roughly 3-to-1. A key technical magnet is an unclosed CME futures gap in the $79,660–$81,210 range, with historical data showing roughly 90% of such gaps close.
The Federal Reserve's March 18 rate decision is viewed as a near-term stress test and potential breakout catalyst for the $80,000 thesis. At press time, Bitcoin was trading at $70,260.
