Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by end-2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from its current level of around $8 and outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same period.
Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, published a note Monday laying out a staged path: $13 by year-end, then $41, $82, and $133 before the $200 target is reached. The same note places Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.
The Tokenization Engine Behind the Call
The thesis rests on a single macro forecast: tokenized assets on-chain climbing roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028, from approximately $340 billion today. Assets deployed in DeFi are expected to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030.
Because Chainlink earns fees for delivering data and moving assets between blockchains, Kendrick estimates the protocol’s fee revenue should rise approximately 25 times over the period, with the token price assumed to follow fees.
Chainlink’s existing market position forms the second pillar of the argument. The note puts its total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70 percent of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80 percent on Ethereum specifically. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44 percent of that secured value.
Wall Street Already on the Client List
Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global among institutions already using Chainlink services. The note expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fee revenue, given that tokenized funds and bonds require net asset values, rates, and reserve attestations, making them more data-intensive than crypto-native assets.
On interoperability, the note acknowledges Chainlink still trails LayerZero, but highlights momentum: more than $7 billion in token value has shifted from legacy bridges to Chainlink’s CCIP since a $292 million exploit in April. Quarterly CCIP volume reached $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353 percent year on year.
The exploit itself remains contested. KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for the breach and said it planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterisation LayerZero disputes.
Part of a Broader DeFi Sweep
The Chainlink note is the latest in a series of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all anchored to the same 37-fold DeFi growth assumption. He set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July. Uniswap jumped double digits after its note was published.
That shared foundation cuts both ways. Four separate price targets across four separate protocols are not four independent judgements, and if the 37-fold figure proves optimistic, every one of them moves down together.
Chainlink’s market reaction has been subdued by comparison. LINK was trading at $8.25 on Monday, down 0.8 percent on the day, according to CoinGecko data.
Risks Flagged
The note lists its own risks. Institutional tokenization may scale more slowly than the central forecast assumes, pilots may fail to convert into recurring production workflows, specialist data providers may take meaningful market share from Chainlink, and technical failures could erode confidence in the infrastructure.
LINK’s muted response, set against the double-digit move seen in UNI after its equivalent initiation, suggests the market is absorbing the call with caution rather than conviction.
