The Standard Chartered bitcoin forecast doing the rounds on Thursday, $100,000 by the end of 2026, is the number left after two downgrades of the same target. Analyst Geoff Kendrick carried $300,000 for 2026, cut it to $150,000 in December 2025, and now tells clients to position for $100,000 while bitcoin trades near $72,600.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick told clients on 19 August that investors should position for bitcoin at $100,000 by the end of 2026. |
| 2Bitcoin changed hands at $72,630, or 62,186 euro, on 20 August 2026 at 22:52 CEST according to CoinGecko, so the call needs a 37.7 percent gain inside 133 days. |
| 3The bank's own 2026 target has travelled from $300,000 to $150,000 in December 2025 and now to $100,000. |
| 4Takeaway: his cycle-depth argument survives an independent check, while his liquidity argument is contradicted by rates strategists at four other banks. |
What Kendrick actually wrote
Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at the bank, put the number in a client note reported by Cointelegraph on 19 August: “Investors should now be positioning for a move to USD $100,000 by year-end 2026.” He named $65,500 as the level that would confirm the cycle low has passed. Bitcoin cleared it this week and sat roughly $7,100 above it on Thursday evening.
His trigger sits outside crypto. On 19 August the US Treasury said it would increase, “by at least double”, the size of its liquidity support buyback operations for longer-dated notes and bonds, lifting the cap from $2 billion to at least $4 billion per operation across the 10-to-20-year and 20-to-30-year sectors. Kendrick’s read, per Cointelegraph, is that this “is exactly the type of thing Bitcoin loves”, because supply cannot expand to meet fresh liquidity. Bitcoin ran from below $69,000 to above $73,000 in two sessions, a move we covered when it broke through $71,000 on the Treasury news.
The Standard Chartered bitcoin forecast has been cut twice
The $100,000 headline reads as a bull call only if you meet it for the first time. The bank’s published 2026 target was $300,000. On 9 December 2025, CNBC reported that Kendrick halved it to $150,000 and pushed his $500,000 call out to 2030. Future price gains, he wrote to clients then, would be “driven by one leg only”, meaning ETF buying.
The version travelling fastest is Watcher.Guru’s, posted on Thursday afternoon, which carries the target without the two revisions sitting behind it.
Kendrick also judged the drawdown “normal” in December and described the moment as “just a cold breeze” rather than a crypto winter. Bitcoin traded near $87,000 that day. It closed 2025 at $87,648 on Binance and kept sliding, printing $57,800.19 on 1 July 2026, roughly 34 percent below where it stood when he made that call. His end-2025 target had already been halved from $200,000 to $100,000, and the year finished 12 percent under even the reduced number.
The single leg he identified is worth watching on its own terms. Spot bitcoin funds took in $517 million on 19 August, their strongest day since May, and our breakdown of that ETF inflow and the gap between the reported figures shows how fast one session can flatter a flow story.
One claim that survives the check
Kendrick argues this four-year cycle is the shallowest yet, and that part holds up. Measured on Binance’s BTCUSDT record, bitcoin fell 84.1 percent from its December 2017 peak of $19,798.68 to $3,156.26 in December 2018, then 77.6 percent from $69,000 in November 2021 to $15,476 a year later. This time the drop ran from $126,199.63 on 6 October 2025 to $57,800.19 on 1 July 2026, or 54.2 percent.
That makes the current cycle about 23 percentage points gentler than the last one and 30 gentler than the one before it. Bitcoin has recovered 25.7 percent off the July low and still trades 42.4 percent under the October record. Reaching $100,000 would put it back at 79 percent of its all-time high, which is a long way short of a new peak.
Four other banks read the same buyback differently
The size problem
Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities, told Axios that the Treasury funds its repurchases by borrowing elsewhere, swapping long-dated debt for short-dated debt without adding money to the system. “This is not QE,” he said, calling it the Treasury’s “own little version of ‘Operation Twist'”.
“Treasury firing a warning shot across the market’s bow rather than doing something just yet.”
Gennadiy Goldberg, head of US rates strategy at TD Securities, speaking to Axios
ING strategist Chris Turner framed it as a question of scale, telling Fortune that raising the operations by $2 billion “might seem like rearranging deckchairs on the Titanic given the U.S. national debt of $40 trillion”. Run that ratio and a $4 billion operation comes to one hundredth of one percent of the debt pile. Deutsche Bank’s Henry Allen called the increase “not a particularly big amount relative to the number of outstanding Treasuries”, while strategists at BNP Paribas said such measures “will struggle to offset either declining Fed credibility or rising rate expectations”.
The voices on Kendrick’s side
Fortune also quoted Ed Yardeni reading the same announcement as a signal that officials will do “whatever it takes to keep a lid on bond yields”. Then on Thursday the Treasury secretary went further, telling CNBC that the operation “could be more than the 4 billion per issue”, while declining to name a number. Should that ceiling keep rising, the liquidity argument gains the weight its critics say it currently lacks.
The engine switches off before the target date
One line in the Treasury release cuts against the whole trade. The larger operations are “effective September 9, 2026” and run “for the remainder of this refunding quarter (through November 4, 2026)”, with the next sizing decision due at the quarterly refunding on 4 November. The policy Kendrick names as his driver therefore carries an announced stop date 57 days before the date his target has to be met.
Bessent’s remark points towards an extension without committing to one, and the yield relief underneath the whole thesis has already faded. The 30-year bond shed nine basis points on Wednesday’s announcement, yet CNBC had it back around 5.235 percent by Thursday, with the 10-year note turning higher again at roughly 4.704 percent. Getting bitcoin from $72,630 to $100,000 needs 37.7 percent in 133 days. That is an ordinary move by this asset’s standards, and it is a large one to hang on four buyback operations a quarter.
Kendrick did leave something testable behind. He named $65,500 as the marker for a confirmed cycle low, and bitcoin sits about $7,100 above it tonight. That line and the 4 November refunding both come due well before 31 December, which is more than most price targets can say for themselves.
