Standard Chartered-backed Anchorpoint has prepared to launch its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin HKDAP, with a joint announcement expected before the end of July, according to local media. According to local media citing market sources, Standard Chartered Bank (Hong Kong) and…
Standard Chartered maintained its end-2026 Bitcoin price forecast of $100,000 in a note to investors on Friday, arguing that the recent weakness reflects a failure by Strategy to explain a strategic shift rather than any deterioration in the company’s balance sheet.
Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, wrote that Strategy — the largest corporate holder of Bitcoin, with 843,775 coins, more than 4% of the 21 million that will ever exist — “appears to be pivoting from its ‘never sell Bitcoin’ mantra to a more complex approach.”
Clear communication of that pivot, he wrote, will determine how fast the pressure on BTC lifts.
Between 2020 and mid-2025, Strategy’s mNAV — enterprise value divided by the value of its Bitcoin — traded above 1.0. That premium lets the company issue shares, buy Bitcoin, and grow its value by more than the value of the new stock. Convincing the market it would never sell was the load-bearing part of the model.
With mNAV near 1.0, that arithmetic no longer works. Kendrick said Strategy is pivoting toward holding Bitcoin as backing for STRC, its perpetual preferred stock, which functions as a credit product.
JUST IN: Standard Chartered Bank says it still predicts Bitcoin to hit $100,000 this year, calling BTC "a screaming buy." pic.twitter.com/zDgF66jvxf
STRC pays a 12% annual dividend, settled twice a month in cash, with the rate reset each month to keep the security near its $100 par value. It has about $10 billion notional outstanding, the largest of the instruments Strategy has deployed.
A negative feedback loop took hold once STRC broke from par, hitting an intraday low of $71.25 on June 26. The divergence began after the June 1 disclosure that Strategy had sold 32 BTC the prior week. STRC still trades near $90, according to Standard Chartered. The USD reserve for STRC dividends stands at $2.55 billion, or 17.4 months of coverage.
Bitcoin is a ‘screaming buy’
The problem with “never sell,” Kendrick argued, is that it constrains how Bitcoin gets perceived. Strategy has announced a monetization program that lets it sell BTC from time to time, including up to $1.25 billion in proceeds for the reserve.
Given its Bitcoin backing, STRC is over-collateralized and should trade back toward $100, the note said. Kendrick compared the mechanism to a central bank promising to do “whatever it takes” and, through credibility, never having to act.
Effective signaling, he wrote, should remove the need for Strategy to sell any Bitcoin. Kendrick treats the episode as noise rather than a signal about BTC’s medium-term direction. At $64,000, he calls the coin “a screaming buy.”
Strategy sold 3,588 BTC for about $216 million last week, its largest disposal to date, using the proceeds to fund preferred stock distributions and refill the reserve. JPMorgan analysts said the formal sale policy introduces “avoidable two-way risk” by making Strategy both buyer and seller.
Strategy’s stock trades near $98 on Thursday. BTC traded above $64,400 on Friday.
Standard Chartered has executed its first digital asset prime brokerage trades with LMAX Group, a milestone in the build-out of institutional market infrastructure for crypto.
With this move, the bank became one of the first Global Systemically Important Banks (G-SIBs) to test a prime brokerage model for digital assets inside established risk, compliance and market frameworks.
The pilot covered spot Bitcoin (XBT/USD) with T+1 settlement through Standard Chartered’s UK branch. These were the bank’s first digital asset credit intermediation trades under a prime brokerage structure.
The transactions ran on LMAX Digital, LMAX Group’s regulated institutional venue, with Standard Chartered Prime Brokerage acting as the credit intermediary between counterparties. Settlement completed through the bank’s digital asset custody platform in the Dubai International Financial Centre (DIFC).
Prime brokerage has underpinned equities and foreign exchange for decades, giving institutions a single counterparty for credit, execution and settlement. Crypto has lacked that layer. As capital shifts away from direct exchange access, the gap has widened: in 2025, flows through prime brokers and OTC desks grew at more than 10 times the rate of flows into exchanges.
A digital asset prime brokerage at scale needs a counterparty with the governance, risk discipline and credit capacity to stand behind institutional trades. Most global banks have partnered with crypto-native firms or stayed on the sidelines.
Standard Chartered said their approach differs: the bank is stepping in as credit intermediary on its own balance sheet, with LMAX Group supplying the regulated execution infrastructure beneath it.
In short, a bank is bringing its own balance sheet to digital assets rather than renting someone else’s.
What the Standard Chartered pilot validated
The transactions confirmed core controls across credit, margin, risk management, trade booking, settlement and reporting, and showed the model operating inside existing regulatory frameworks.
The test brought together LMAX Group’s execution and matching technology with the bank’s client connectivity, electronic messaging, trade matching and an early validation of netting approaches. It offered a view into how traditional and digital asset infrastructure can operate as one workflow.
The two firms describe the pilot as a step toward a roadmap for scalable, institutional-grade market infrastructure.
It builds on the digital asset trading capability Standard Chartered launched in 2025.
“This pilot is part of our broader strategy to build a comprehensive institutional-grade digital asset platform, spanning custody, trading and prime brokerage,” said Alison Higgins, Head of Prime Services at Standard Chartered. “As demand accelerates, we are helping our Prime Brokerage clients capture new opportunities backed by the risk management, controls and balance sheet strength they expect from a G-SIB.”
David Mercer, CEO of LMAX Group, framed the trade as a fix for a structural gap. “The lack of credit counterparties with robust balance sheets on the scale that we see in traditional finance has been a critical missing mechanism in the digital asset market to date,” he said. “This is a great example of the impending convergence of TradFi and digital assets to a cross-asset capital markets future.”
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