Standard Chartered's Crystal Ball Returns: 47% Off ETH, 50x On AAVE 🪞

Aave recorded its largest single-day wallet growth in nearly five years on June 30, with 1,806 new addresses created on Ethereum, according to on-chain analytics firm Santiment. The surge coincided with Standard Chartered initiating coverage of AAVE at a $3,500 price target, implying nearly 50 times upside by 2030 and built on assumptions about tokenized assets flowing into decentralized finance. The same research desk that issued the Aave (AAVE) forecast cut its 2026 Bitcoin target from $150,000 to $100,000 and reduced its Ethereum price target 47%, from $7,500 to $4,000, within the same three-month stretch.

Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick framed the call as a broader digital-asset thesis. "We forecast significant upside for digital asset token prices into year-end, and we think Aave has moved beyond the April incident," Kendrick said. That April incident was the KelpDAO exploit, which drained roughly $292 million and briefly cut Aave's deposits nearly in half during the KelpDAO exploit fallout. The bank made a similar target call on Uniswap (UNI) weeks earlier, and that forecast also preceded a jump in Uniswap network activity before activity cooled.

Aave founder Stani Kulechov confirmed the protocol has restarted its AAVE buyback program under Aavenomics 3.0, adding a direct revenue-to-token mechanism. Santiment's Network Growth metric showed Aave (on Ethereum) posting its strongest growth day since 2021, ending June at a multi-year network expansion peak. Whether the new wallets convert into deposits and borrowing, rather than short-lived attention, will determine if Aave's growth outlasts Standard Chartered's own forecasting record on Bitcoin ($BTC) and Ethereum ($ETH).