Aave's 50x moonshot: StanChart sees $3,500 by 2030 once DeFi stops reliving April 💸

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of decentralized lending protocol Aave with a $3,500 price target by the end of 2030, implying a roughly 50-fold increase from AAVE's current price near $70, according to a report by the bank's head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick. The target would see the token outperform both $BTC and $ETH over the period, the bank said. AAVE traded at $75.61 at the time of publication.

Kendrick said Aave has moved past the April cybertheft incident, referring to the collapse of KelpDAO's rsETH bridge in which attackers used roughly $290 million of stolen tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow real assets. The episode left Aave facing potential losses of up to $230 million and triggered a wave of withdrawals. "We think Aave has moved past the April cybertheft incident as assets start to return to the platform," Kendrick wrote, adding that the protocol appears to have recovered and remains well positioned to maintain its dominance in onchain lending.

Kendrick described Aave as akin to an automated, blockchain-based bank operating without employees or discretionary decision-making. At its October 2025 peak, the protocol held roughly $75 billion in deposits, a level that would have ranked it among the 30 largest banks in the United States, he said.

The report cited the broader growth of tokenized assets as a key driver, with Standard Chartered expecting the value of tokenized assets actively used within DeFi applications to increase 37-fold by the end of the decade. Because Aave's revenue model is closely tied to lending activity and deposits, the bank anticipates protocol growth will translate relatively directly into gains for the AAVE token. The report also pointed to the potential restart of Aave's token buyback program and its Horizon initiative, which is designed to support lending against tokenized real-world assets in a permissioned environment, as additional catalysts.