Standard Chartered sees UNI at $100 by 2030, and the chart crowd is already fighting about it 🏦

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Uniswap, projecting that the protocol's UNI token could rise roughly 40x to $100 by the end of 2030, with a $6.50 year-end target. In a client note dated Monday, June 15, Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, said tokenization is a major potential catalyst and that Uniswap is "uniquely positioned to scale" as on-chain assets grow. Kendrick expects the value of assets active in DeFi to expand 37x to $2.7 trillion by 2030, arguing that Uniswap's neutral, rules-based automated market maker makes it a natural liquidity layer for institutions. He framed Uniswap as market infrastructure, likening the DEX to YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix: "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." He also projected UNI would outperform $BTC and $ETH over the period if the protocol secures more traditional finance partnerships. Uniswap CEO Hayden Adams called the Standard Chartered projection a "great" piece, while Dragonfly investor Omar Kanji pushed back, writing, "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."

The price reaction was immediate. On Monday, June 15, UNI traded around $2.72, up 9.8% over 24 hours, according to CoinGecko. By Wednesday, June 17, UNI had climbed 22.5% to $3.53 on the day, later tagging a local high of $3.70 and reaching $3.63 at publication, up 19.8% over 24 hours and 48.4% over the week, per CoinGecko. Market capitalization rose to roughly $2.26 billion on 24-hour volume near $864 million, and derivatives data showed Binance top-trader long/short accounts at 63.18% long versus 36.82% short, a ratio of 1.72. Technical analysts pointed to $3 as an immediate pivot: a weekly close above it opens targets of $3.60 and $4.00, with $5.35 as the next major barrier after UNI rebounded from channel support near $2.35, while a rejection could drag the token back to $2.60 or $2.40. Broader altcoins participated in the bid, with HYPE up 7.8% on the day and 34.3% on the week, $SOL up 14.7% over seven days, and $ETH gaining 1.4% to $1,793, up 10.4% on the week; $XRP slipped 0.9% to $1.22 as $BTC held near $65,800, down 0.3% over 24 hours but up 7.4% on the week.

The Standard Chartered thesis rests on Uniswap's fee economics and token burns. Since the protocol's December fee activation, roughly 100 million UNI, or 10% of supply, was burned in a one-time retroactive event, and an additional 106.15 million UNI has been burned since, bringing total supply to roughly 895 million from 1 billion. The protocol currently generates about $858 million in annual fees, with a portion routed to UNI buybacks, and Kendrick noted an ongoing annualized burn rate of roughly 1%. Uniswap's "UNIfication" upgrade in late 2025 programmatically ties more burns to rising trading volumes. ARK Invest's Lorenzo Valente separately wrote that the protocol posted a record $125 billion in monthly trading volume in October 2025, has since reclaimed the top spot among DEXs at 25–30% of total volume, and earns "close to half of all gross spot trading fees in the space," with annualized burns closer to 2% of total supply over the past 30 days. Since launching in 2018, Uniswap has facilitated more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume and netted $5.6 billion in fees, according to DeFiLlama.

Institutional adoption is a key plank of the call. In early 2026, BlackRock and Fidelity expanded to Uniswap to scale their respective tokenized money market funds, and on June 12 Uniswap launched tokenized securities on its app, wallet, and API, making tokenized stocks including SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, and NVIDIA tradable on the platform. The company said more than $9.1 billion had been swapped in real-world-asset pools ahead of the launch, calling the debut "a small fraction of what's coming." UNI still trades far below its all-time high of $44.92, set in May 2021. Kendrick flagged risks from niche competitors that can build more competitive solutions for specific use cases and from the standardization of compliance rules around tokenization, and he argued that a credible path exists for tokenized assets to migrate on-chain as Wall Street infrastructure providers integrate with DeFi.