Ether Slips Under $1,800 After Standard Chartered Cuts 2026 Target to $4,000; FG Nexus Moves 10,000 ETH
Ethereum's layer-2 landscape is under renewed scrutiny after Zero Network shut down last month, the latest casualty among struggling rollups. Market participants say the sector is moving into consolidation for general-purpose chains rather than facing a broad-based collapse.
Usage remains concentrated. Base and Arbitrum now account for more than 80% of layer-2 DeFi total value locked. Smaller networks including Linea, World Chain, Starknet and Mantle have posted declining bridge deposits over the past six months, prompting Vitalik Buterin to urge a rethink of the long-term scaling roadmap.
Standard Chartered cut its 2026 ether price target by 47% to $4,000 from $7,500, while keeping its 2030 forecast at $40,000. The bank described the move as a cyclical reset, and also trimmed its end-2026 Bitcoin target to $100,000 as part of a broader repricing. Geoff Kendrick, Global Head of Digital Assets Research, said network usage supports the long-term view: transaction counts and total value locked in ETH terms remain near record highs, even as ether trades about 65% below its August 2025 peak of $4,946.
On the corporate side, a wallet linked to Nasdaq-listed treasury firm FG Nexus transferred another 10,000 ETH on Wednesday, worth about $17.8 million at current prices. The move extends a series of sales that has already seen the company dispose of more than 21,000 ETH for roughly $55 million. FG Nexus accumulated 50,770 ETH between August and September 2025 at an average price of $3,860, a stake once valued near $196 million. With ether around $1,765, the position is down roughly 54% from cost, implying paper losses above $100 million. FG Nexus shares fell 13.4% in premarket trading following the disclosure.
At the Proof of Talk conference in Paris, Bitmine chairman Tom Lee floated a $250,000 ether target, arguing for a 50x move driven by AI-related payments flow and a corporate validator takeover of the network. At that level, Ethereum's market value would exceed $30 trillion, overtaking the U.S. Treasury market. Lee said public companies and governments collectively control more than 7% of circulating supply, while the Ethereum Foundation's stake has declined to about 0.1%.
Circulating supply stands at 121.75 million ETH and is rising at about 0.82% annually after the Dencun upgrade reduced fee burn to roughly 29,000 ETH per year.
Institutional positioning remains split. Listed miner BitMine, described as the largest publicly traded ether holder with more than 5.4 million ETH, recently added about $52 million worth of ETH and announced plans to issue dividend-paying preferred shares to broaden its treasury financing options. The contrast between accumulators such as BitMine and sellers like FG Nexus is increasingly shaping the corporate altcoin-treasury narrative. Analysts say buyers are leaning on long-duration theses tied to on-chain activity and staking yield, while distressed sellers are exiting positions built near the 2025 cycle highs to manage equity-market drawdowns.
The layer-2 reshuffle is also pushing several major rollups away from general-purpose positioning toward narrower verticals in payments, stablecoins and tokenized assets. Espresso Systems co-founder Ben Fisch said that anywhere a smart contract can run on an existing chain, a layer two can run as well, suggesting the pullback reflects an oversupply of similar products rather than a structural decline in rollup demand. The shift aligns with Buterin's renewed focus on application-specific scaling and with DeFi liquidity migration that has benefited the two dominant networks while draining users and capital from niche chains.
Ether last traded at $1,782.09, down 1.78% over 24 hours and still in a clear downtrend. RSI at 18.5 is deeply oversold, increasing the odds of a near-term reflex bounce, but MACD remains bearish. Support is seen at $1,770.37, then $1,718.77 and $1,667.91. Resistance starts at $1,825.90, followed by $1,893.39 and $2,002.87. A high-volume move back above $1,825.90 would soften the bearish setup, while a daily close below $1,718.77 would undermine an oversold-bounce case and raise the risk of a slide toward the $1,667 area.
