Standard Chartered Bets Chainlink Prints 25x as Tokenization Hits $4T 📈

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 price target by the end of 2030, implying roughly a 25-fold gain from around $8 today and outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period. In a note published Monday, Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, laid out staged targets of $13 by year-end 2025, $41, $82 and $133 before reaching $200. The same note pencils in Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.

Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028 from about $340 billion now, with assets deployed in DeFi growing 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Because Chainlink charges for delivering data and moving assets between chains, the bank estimates its fees should rise about 25 times over that period and assumes the token price follows fees. The note puts Chainlink's total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum, with Aave V3 alone accounting for 44% of that secured value.

Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global among institutions using Chainlink services, and expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fees as tokenized funds and bonds rely on net asset values, rates and reserve attestations. On interoperability, the note says more than $7 billion in token value has moved from legacy bridges to Chainlink's CCIP since a $292 million exploit in April, with quarterly CCIP volume reaching $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year on year. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization LayerZero disputes.

The note is the latest in a run of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all built on the same 37-fold forecast; he set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July. UNI, the governance token of decentralized exchange Uniswap, jumped double digits after the June note to a local high of $3.70, its highest level in over a month, lifting Uniswap's market cap to roughly $2.26 billion on 24-hour volume near $864 million per CoinGecko data. Chainlink's response has been more muted, with LINK trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day per CoinGecko. Risks flagged in the note include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, and specialist pressure on incumbency.