Ethereum’s outlook has been improving its case. After a prolonged period of underperformance and skepticism, the network is starting to exhibit signs of renewed structural and fundamental strength.  While BTC continues to anchor the market as the primary store of value and digital gold, conditions are emerging that could allow ETH to outperform BTC over the coming period.

Why The Ethereum Narrative Is Gaining Strength

Ethereum has been seen outperforming Bitcoin. In a recent post on X, Walter Bloomberg revealed that Standard Chartered says that the ETH outlook has improved, and now ETH might outperform BTC, citing rising institutional demand and stronger fundamental positioning across key on-chain sectors. 

While weakness in BTC has weighed on the broader crypto market, ETH has continued to benefit from institutional-driven demand, and its dominance in stablecoins, decentralized finance (DeFi), and real-world assets (RWA) tokenization.

Standard Chartered also points to the increased throughput and potential US regulatory clarity that it could provide additional upside. In terms of valuation, the bank forecasts ETH at $7,500 this year and $30,000 by 2029, reflecting the expectations of sustained network growth.

The Co-founder of PinkBrains_io, a DeFi Creator Studio, DefiIgnas, has highlighted that Ethereum could outperform Bitcoin this year, and the reason is roadmap execution. While BTC will likely keep facing recurring waves of quantum FUD into 2026, ETH has a clear roadmap to prepare for future cryptographic risks. 

Furthermore, ETH is actually scaling. Gas limits on layer 1 keep rising, and zkEVMs will get full production readiness, making ETH cheap and fast enough for high-value transactions, while layer 2s will handle most of the trading and high-frequency activity.

Related Reading: Bitcoin And Ethereum Market Structure Points To Crypto Winter – Details

These upgrades are incremental, which means there’s no breaking news moment for ETH, but progress is happening fast. Early in the cycle, a lot of Degens loaded up on ETH before the bull run, but many got disillusioned and sold their ETH for BTC. “It would be fun to see the playbook reverse higher,” DefiIgnas noted.

A Different Liquidity Cycle Than Previous Bull Markets

Crypto liquidity quality witnessed a change in 2025. A technical analyst and show host of Crypto Banter, Kyledoops, reported that Wintermute noted that capital in 2025 stopped rotating broadly across the market. Instead, liquidity is concentrated into Bitcoin, Ethereum, and a small group of large-cap tokens. As a result, the long-anticipated wave of altcoin-wide liquidity never really arrived.

Meanwhile, the rise of spot ETFs and crypto treasury vehicles created a new, highly structured inflow channel that funneled flow into the top of the market. These vehicles break the crypto’s oldest playbooks. Price action is no longer driven by broad market expansion. It’s driven by where new liquidity can actually enter.

In an era marked by rising inflation, Bitcoin was framed as a radical experiment in digital cash. However, as the global economic landscape has shifted, the narrative around BTC has changed. It is now being discussed as a modern savings tool designed for a world where traditional savings are steadily losing their purchasing power.

Normalisation Of Bitcoin As A Savings Asset

A common framing of Bitcoin today is that it is a savings technology, digital gold, and something to hold, rather than use. According to Ben SAN’s post on X, that framing has become incomplete and ultimately wrong. This is because BTC is not meant to sit alongside fiat as another savings vehicle, but to replace fiat as a monetary base and a financial base that cannot be used or function as money.

However, for BTC to operate as a form of finance, it has to be usable at scale. That usability at scale implies execution, settlement abstraction, fast interactions, and cost-efficient transactions. BTC layer 1 is designed for finality and neutrality, not to satisfy these requirements, and it shouldn’t be.

This is why BTC needs layer 2s to operate as money. “Once you accept that Bitcoin needs L2s to be usable as money, you stop asking whether alts are competing with Bitcoin and start asking whether they are serving Bitcoin,” the expert stated. If acceptance of altcoins is ever possible in the BTC-first community, it won’t come from alternative monetary assets. Instead, the acceptance of the altcoins will only come from systems that keep BTC as the unit of account and native asset, while extending its usability crucially without weakening its guarantees. 

In these cases, auxiliary tokens may be introduced, but only where BTC is structurally incapable of performing the required coordination or incentive functions around expressiveness and yield. Furthermore, any non-BTC asset that has a legitimate chance of being accepted within the community will earn that legitimacy by filling those gaps in a way BTC itself cannot fulfill.

History Shows What Happens After These Bitcoin Buys

Crypto analyst Mattertrades highlighted that Bitcoin is trading above the weekly resistance, and the path is slow and clear. This setup is a result of Michael Saylor stepping in this week with his largest purchase since July, acquiring $1.5 billion worth of BTC. The last time he did this, BTC surged to $126,000.

At the same time, the Morgan Stanley Capital International (MSCI)-related news for Strategy was very bullish, and it actually attracted more buyers. Mattertrades concluded that this is how a bullish case quietly forms. If Saylor’s purchases bring in more buyers, reflexivity will begin because when he starts accumulating such large amounts again, other players will follow suit.