Standard Chartered: $UNI Could Pull a 40x by 2030 While TradFi Checks Into DeFi 🏦

Standard Chartered has set a $100 price target on Uniswap's native token by 2030, a level roughly 37 times its current trading price, according to a Monday note from Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets. UNI changed hands around $2.72 on Monday, up 9.8% over the prior day, per CoinGecko, well below its all-time high near $45 reached roughly five years ago. "For TradFi institutions, Uniswap should be viewed less as a retail DEX app and more as market infrastructure that TradFi can integrate with once tokenized assets scale and TradFi operators want to plug them into DeFi," Kendrick wrote, comparing the protocol to YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix.

Kendrick's case rests on Uniswap's structural neutrality, which he said lets traditional finance firms build on the protocol without fear that underlying rules will shift as tokenized assets grow. He also projects that the value of digital assets deposited or staked in DeFi protocols will reach $2.7 trillion by the end of the decade, which he said would leave liquidity pools on Uniswap with 37 times more assets to trade on-chain. Because there is a linear relationship between Uniswap's protocol fees and trading volumes, he added, the platform's planned "UNIfication" upgrade in late 2025 will programmatically trigger additional token burns as activity scales.

Since launch in 2018, Uniswap has facilitated more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume and collected $5.6 billion in fees, according to DeFiLlama. Kendrick noted that UNI's total supply has fallen to roughly 895 million from 1 billion since fee activation in December, a reduction that includes a large retroactive burn plus an ongoing annualized burn rate of around 1%. He flagged two main risks to the thesis: competition from smaller protocols that can build more tailored solutions, and the potential creation of new compliance rules around tokenization, though he maintained that a credible path for tokenized traditional assets remains intact.