StanChart says Aave could bank it like a top-30 US lender — without the paperwork 🏦

Standard Chartered has identified Aave as a potential beneficiary of the migration of tokenized assets into decentralized finance, saying the protocol could rebuild its standing as a dominant onchain lending platform. In a Wednesday research note, Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, wrote that active tokenized assets in DeFi could channel additional deposits into Aave. "Despite recent setbacks, we are bullish on the outlook for Aave, the largest [DeFi] lending protocol," Kendrick wrote.

The bank attributed recent weakness in Aave's performance to a broader decline in digital asset prices and the fallout from a $292 million cybertheft in April involving KelpDAO, which Standard Chartered said affected Aave and contributed to a decline in the protocol's lending market share as assets exited the platform. "We think both of those negatives are poised to fade," Kendrick wrote. "We forecast significant upside for digital asset token prices into year-end, and we think Aave has moved beyond the April incident."

According to the research note, Aave's October 2025 deposit base of about $75 billion would have placed it alongside the 30th-largest US bank by deposits, a scale Kendrick said the protocol could partially reclaim as tokenized assets become more widely used as collateral and sources of liquidity within DeFi. The Aave forecast extends Standard Chartered's tokenization thesis from decentralized trading to lending, positioning the protocol as a potential venue for borrowing against tokenized real-world assets.

In an earlier research note, Standard Chartered projected that assets locked in DeFi could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030, driven by RWAs and other crypto-native assets moving through onchain protocols. Kendrick separately identified Uniswap as a possible trading hub for tokenized markets, citing its scale, brand and history of operating through multiple crypto market cycles.