Standard Chartered Sees Uniswap Going From DeFi Underdog to Wall Street Plumbing by 2030 🏦

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Uniswap on Monday, projecting that the protocol's native token, $UNI, could rise roughly 40x to $100 by the end of 2030. In a note to clients dated June 15, Geoff Kendrick, Global Head of Digital Assets Research at the bank, framed Uniswap less as a retail decentralized exchange and more as market infrastructure that traditional finance can plug into as tokenized assets scale. "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's positioning to YouTube while likening Coinbase to Netflix.

The forecast rests on Kendrick's projection that the value of digital assets deployed in DeFi protocols will reach $2.7 trillion by end-2030, a roughly 37x increase that would leave Uniswap's liquidity pools with significantly more assets to route on-chain. Standard Chartered expects UNI to outperform both $BTC and $ETH over that horizon if the protocol secures additional traditional finance partnerships, and it cited Uniswap's lower market-cap-to-annualized-fees multiple relative to Coinbase as part of the bull case. The protocol has already begun courting that pipeline: in early 2026, BlackRock and Fidelity expanded to Uniswap to scale their respective tokenized money market funds, and CEO Hayden Adams called the Standard Chartered projection a "great" piece.

Since the protocol activated fees in December, UNI's total supply has fallen to roughly 895 million from 1 billion, according to Kendrick, with 106.15 million UNI burned to date including an initial 100 million UNI retroactive burn and an ongoing annualized burn rate of approximately 1%. The "UNIfication" upgrade in late 2025 programmatically ties more token burns to growth in protocol fees, which currently run at $858 million per year, with Uniswap having facilitated more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume and netted $5.6 billion in fees since its 2018 launch per DeFiLlama. The $2.72 price printed on Monday marked a 9.8% 24-hour gain per CoinGecko, reversing the month's losses, with traders flagging $3 as immediate resistance and $3.6 and $4 as upside targets if it flips to support.

The bullish note drew pushback from some market participants, including Dragonfly investor Omar Kanji, who wrote on X that "Straight-up chart crime from Standard Chartered. Including $UNI LP fees in annualized fees and then saying it trades at a 'lower multiple' than $COIN is some serious slop analysis." Kendrick acknowledged the risks, noting that Uniswap faces competition from smaller players building specialized solutions and that headwinds could emerge from compliance rules around tokenization, though he still described a credible path for tokenized TradFi assets to migrate through the protocol.