The strongest bullish call on Bitcoin in current circulation comes from Bernstein, which has reaffirmed a $150,000 year-end target on the view that institutional ownership is becoming more durable and less speculative than in earlier cycles. That thesis has drawn support from the continued expansion of crypto-linked exchange-traded products and from corporate treasury accumulation led by Strategy, formerly MicroStrategy, whose Bitcoin buying has helped keep the company central to the market’s institutional narrative. At the same time, the headline figure in the user prompt that referred to Strategy holding more than 715,000 Bitcoin is already out of date. Strategy said in January that it held 709,715 Bitcoin, and market reports this month indicate the total has since climbed materially beyond that level.
That matters because the Bitcoin story is no longer being sold mainly as a retail speculation trade. Banks, fund issuers and corporate treasury vehicles are now shaping the market’s direction more visibly than in previous runs. Reuters reported this week that Goldman Sachs has filed for its first Bitcoin ETF product, following Morgan Stanley’s own launch, even as crypto prices remain under pressure from weaker risk sentiment and geopolitical strain. Bloomberg, in reporting on Morgan Stanley’s fund debut, said spot Bitcoin ETFs launched over the past two years now command more than $85 billion in assets, showing that the institutionalisation trend is intact even if some of the more exuberant asset forecasts are not yet supported by price action.
Ethereum’s case is built less on scarcity and more on utility. Standard Chartered’s Geoffrey Kendrick has projected Ether at $7,500 by the end of 2026, arguing that Ethereum is likely to regain momentum as institutional participation deepens. Axi, in a broader survey of outlooks, said 2026 projections increasingly place Ether in an $8,000 to $10,000 consolidation range, reflecting expectations that network adoption, tokenisation and staking products will expand over time. Those are long-range scenarios rather than immediate trading calls, but they frame the debate over whether Ethereum can recover its standing after a period in which Bitcoin has dominated institutional flows.
Ethereum’s technical bull case rests heavily on Pectra, the network upgrade that the Ethereum Foundation said was activated on mainnet on May 7, 2025. Ethereum. org says the upgrade was successfully implemented at epoch 364032 and describes it as a major step forward for users, developers and validators. Market advocates have argued that Pectra improves wallet usability and validator flexibility, including a much higher maximum effective balance for validators, changes intended to make the network more attractive for larger-scale staking and infrastructure participation. Even so, upgrades do not automatically convert into higher token prices, and Ether has remained far below the more ambitious targets attached to it by bullish bank research.
Cardano’s situation is also more nuanced than the prompt suggests. Protocol Version 11, officially confirmed in February as the van Rossem hard fork, is real and advancing, but it has not yet been fully enacted on mainnet. Intersect, the member-based organisation coordinating parts of Cardano’s development process, said this week that the van Rossem upgrade is nearing a stable release and remains on track for an indicative mainnet enactment in late June 2026. Earlier Intersect updates confirmed that Protocol Version 11 had been named van Rossem and was already being tested on SanchoNet, with Node v10.7 identified as the main hard-fork candidate. That means the upgrade is a live and credible development story, but not an already completed milestone.
The weakest part of the original framing is the AlphaPepe claim. A check across high-quality reporting and primary materials does not produce reliable evidence that institutional accumulation in AlphaPepe is outpacing Cardano’s Protocol 11 upgrade in any measurable way. Unlike Bitcoin ETF growth, Ethereum’s Pectra activation or Cardano’s documented hard-fork timetable, that assertion does not appear to rest on verifiable disclosures from major financial institutions, recognised market data providers or official project documentation. On a strict fact-checking basis, it should be treated as an unverified promotional claim rather than an established market development.
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