Despite the current structural pain, the long-term thesis hasn't completely cracked. Whales have actually been capitalizing on the panic, with exchange data showing over 475,000 ETH accumulating into private wallets earlier this month. Global banking analysts, including Standard Chartered, have dialed back their short-term expectations but still project ETH to target $4,000 by the tail-end of the macro cycle, maintaining a hyper-bullish target of $40,000 for 2030 once scalability issues are resolved.