Standard Chartered sees UNI doing 40x by 2030 — and the token immediately did 22% 🚀

Uniswap's UNI jumped 22.5% to $3.53 on Wednesday after Standard Chartered initiated coverage of the decentralized exchange with a 2030 price target of $100, roughly 40 times the token's level cited in the report. Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, set out the call in a Monday note dated June 15, arguing that UNI could outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum over the next four years as tokenized traditional assets migrate on-chain. "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.

The bank projects that $2.7 trillion in digital assets will be deposited or staked in DeFi protocols by the end of the decade, a roughly 37x expansion from current levels. Kendrick cited a linear relationship between Uniswap's protocol fees and trading volumes and pointed to the platform's "UNIfication" upgrade in late 2025, which programmatically burns UNI from fee revenue. Since fee activation in December, total UNI supply has fallen to roughly 895 million from 1 billion following an initial 100 million UNI retroactive burn, with an additional 6.15 million UNI burned since at an average pace of about 1 million per month in 2026. The protocol currently generates $858 million in annualized fees and has facilitated more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume while netting $5.6 billion in fees since its 2018 launch, according to DeFiLlama.

The price action extended a rally that began after the upgrade news. UNI was changing hands around $2.72 on Monday, up 9.8% over the prior 24 hours, and briefly tagged $3 before pulling back, per CoinGecko. UNI last peaked near $45 five years ago. Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams called Standard Chartered's projection "great." Other analysts pushed back, with Dragonfly investor Omar Kanji writing on X that including UNI LP fees in annualized fees and then claiming a "lower multiple" than Coinbase's COIN amounted to "serious slop analysis."

The rotation extended beyond UNI. Hyperliquid's HYPE rose 7.8% on the day and 34.3% on the week, solana added 14.7% over seven days, and ether gained 1.4% to $1,793, up 10.4% on the week. XRP slipped 0.9% to $1.22, while Bitcoin traded roughly flat around $65,800, down 0.3% over 24 hours but up 7.4% on the week. Brent crude fell below $79 a barrel, its lowest in more than three months, after sliding 15% over four sessions on bets that a US-Iran memorandum would reopen the Strait of Hormuz and release supply, with the deal giving Iran the right to sell oil immediately and access a $300 billion development fund in exchange for committing never to seek a nuclear weapon.

The macro setup left traders focused on the Federal Reserve's first rate decision under new Chair Kevin Warsh. Cheaper oil has eased the inflation picture just as Warsh takes over, and benchmark Australian and Japanese 10-year yields slipped about five basis points as bonds rallied. US stocks were softer, with the Nasdaq 100 down almost 2% on Tuesday as chipmakers pulled back, though S&P 500 futures edged up 0.2%. Standard Chartered's coverage gave UNI enough momentum to reverse its June losses, with the $3 level now the immediate pivot for short-term traders watching whether bulls can defend it or short sellers push the token back toward $2.60 or $2.40.