Standard Chartered issued an extraordinarily rosy note on Friday regarding the crypto industry’s near-term prospects, estimating that the digital assets market is poised to balloon nearly four times over to a market capitalization of $10 trillion by the end of 2026. 

“We expect the coming two-year period to see similar price gains for digital assets (in percentage terms) to 2021,” the British bank said in a note shared with Decrypt. “As in 2021, existing digital assets are likely to see price rises and new subsectors emerge; this time, real-world use cases are finally poised to go mainstream.”

The bank doubled down on previous estimates that, by the end of next year, Bitcoin will reach $200,000 and Ethereum will surpass $10,000. That's quite a jump from current prices of approximately $76,500 and $2,950, respectively.

Much of this enthusiasm stems from Donald Trump’s decisive victory in Tuesday’s U.S. presidential election. Trump, who made a laundry list of crypto-related commitments on the campaign trail this year, looks increasingly likely to retake the White House armed with Republican majorities in the Senate and House.

Standard Chartered expects that Trump and his congressional allies will swiftly implement a number of measures that will unleash positive price action for numerous cryptocurrencies. 

Among them are the repeal of SAB 121, which discourages banks from custodying crypto; the passage of stablecoin legislation; a complete dissolution of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC’s) crypto crackdown; and the potential of Trump creating a strategic U.S. government Bitcoin reserve—though Standard Chartered thinks there’s a “low probability” of such a plan, despite enthusiasm among some Republicans and industry members.

“The new U.S. administration is likely to bring regulatory changes that are needed to drive the next leg of growth in digital assets,” Standard Chartered said.

The bank also expects other new developments to define the crypto ecosystem over the next two years. For one, it says that despite Bitcoin’s rocketing price, the world’s top cryptocurrency is poised to decrease in dominance over the digital assets sector—from its current valuation at 60% of the entire crypto industry to just 40% by the end of 2026. 

Driving this explosion in the value of altcoins, so Standard Chartered predicts, will be the ascendance of real-world applications for crypto tokens with utility.

“Digital assets that are more exposed to end uses are likely to benefit more,” the bank wrote. “In particular, we expect Solana to outperform both BTC and ETH.”

Standard Chartered is betting that several use cases are poised to drive this trend for altcoins in the immediate future, including growth in gaming, decentralized physical infrastructure (or DePIN), and on-chain consumer social products.

Edited by Andrew Hayward