Standard Chartered Calls Bitcoin a ‘Screaming Buy’ at $64K, Holds $100K Target Despite Strategy’s Record Sell-Off

Standard Chartered has reaffirmed its $100,000 end-2026 BBTC$64,142.00▼0.34% price target, calling the asset a “screaming buy” at current levels — and dismissing the panic around Strategy’s largest-ever BTC sale as “mostly noise” rooted in poor communication rather than any crack in the fundamentals. The note, published within the last 24 hours, puts the bank squarely against a wave of bearish sentiment that followed Strategy’s decision to offload 3,588 BTC for $216 million, a move that rattled holders already on edge after a sluggish summer for crypto prices.

Bitcoin is trading at $64,187. Down 0.16% in the past 24 hours, up 2.65% over the past seven days, with a market cap of $1.287 trillion and BTC dominance holding at 56.3% of the total $2.286 trillion crypto market. The Crypto Fear & Greed Index sits at 26/100 — firmly in “Fear” territory as of July 11, 2026. That gap between what the sentiment gauge is reading and what Standard Chartered’s analysts say the fundamentals actually show is exactly the tension the bank is leaning into.

The core of the argument: the Strategy sell-off was misread. Standard Chartered characterised the sale as a communication failure around Strategy’s new credit-backed monetisation model, not a signal that a major holder had lost conviction in Bitcoin’s trajectory, according to Decrypt. Strategy pivoted from its long-held “never sell” posture to a credit-backed approach, and the bank says that shift was poorly communicated to markets — leaving investors to fill the information vacuum with worst-case interpretations.

That pivot matters. Strategy has been the most visible corporate Bitcoin accumulator of the cycle; when the company that built its entire identity around relentless BTC accumulation suddenly sells, the market reads it as a referendum on the asset itself. Standard Chartered’s counter is that the referendum is on Strategy’s treasury management, not on Bitcoin. The bank’s unchanged $100,000 target, corroborated by Whale Alert, signals that institutional forecasters with publicly tracked price calls are not flinching — at least not yet.

The “screaming buy” framing, reported by Bitcoin Magazine, is aggressive language for a bank that has staked its crypto credibility on a series of publicly tracked calls. It also lands at a moment when the supply-side picture is more constrained than headline sentiment suggests — up to 12% of Bitcoin miners’ treasury BTC is locked as collateral and not free to sell, per related desk coverage on the CleanSpark story, a structural ceiling on how much mined supply can actually hit the market in a panic. That detail sits uneasily alongside the Fear & Greed reading of 26, which reflects retail and trader sentiment rather than the locked-up reality of miner treasuries.

Standard Chartered is not alone in pushing back against the gloom. Grayscale separately called a “durable bottom” around the same period, per this desk’s related coverage on Strategy’s sale. Two of the most prominent institutional voices in crypto are using language like “screaming buy” and “durable bottom” while the Fear & Greed Index sits in the 20s — the divergence between institutional framing and market sentiment is wide enough to be its own story. The Yahoo Finance summary of the Standard Chartered note frames the Bitcoin-MSTR panic as “mostly noise,” a phrase that does a lot of work given that Strategy’s sale was its largest-ever BTC disposal.

The skepticism cuts both ways, though. Standard Chartered has a publicly tracked $100,000 call to defend, and reiterating it after a sell-off — rather than quietly revising — is exactly the kind of move that keeps a forecast in the news cycle. Banks that issue price targets benefit from the attention those targets generate, and doubling down on a call during a fear episode is a low-cost way to maintain institutional relevance if the call is already baked into the bank’s public profile. That does not make the call wrong. But it does mean the bank’s incentives and the market’s reading of fundamentals are not perfectly aligned.

For now, the data shows a market that is skeptical but not collapsing. Bitcoin’s 24-hour decline is a modest 0.16%, and the seven-day gain of 2.65% suggests the Strategy-driven sell-off has not triggered broader capitulation. EETH$1,798.86▲0.00% is up 0.74% to $1,798 over 24 hours; BBNB$578.63▲0.63% has gained 0.44% to $578 — indicating the Fear reading is not translating into uniform selling across the majors. The total crypto market cap is down just 0.1% over 24 hours, with $53.8 billion in volume. Hardly the footprint of a sector in full retreat.

The next test for Standard Chartered’s thesis is whether Bitcoin can hold the $64,000 level without a fresh wave of forced selling from leveraged miners or overextended corporate holders. If Strategy’s communication pivot is truly the issue, the market should stabilise as the credit-backed model is better understood. If it is not, the next large on-chain move will tell a different story.