Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum’s ARB token on Tuesday and set a $10 price target for the end of 2030, arguing that Arbitrum’s business is to license its technology to traditional finance firms and take a cut of what those firms earn.
In a note titled Arbitrum – The blockchain for TradFi, Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, forecast ARB at $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 by the end of 2027, $3.50 by the end of 2028, $6.50 by the end of 2029, and $10.00 by the end of 2030.
All five figures are new. The bank had no prior ARB forecast. Over the same period, Standard Chartered expects bitcoin to reach $500,000 and ether $40,000, up from its end-of-this-year targets of $100,000 and $4,000.
According to CoinGecko, ARB traded at $0.137 on Tuesday, up 1% over 24 hours and down 21% over seven days, with a market capitalization of $916 million. The token is up 87% over the past 30 days.
How the bank frames Arbitrum’s revenue base
Standard Chartered is valuing ARB as a claim on revenue that the token does not currently receive directly. The report says Arbitrum’s fee income accrues to a DAO treasury controlled by token holders, and notes that the token “has no direct way of accruing such value at present.”
The note says Arbitrum generates income from four lines:
- transaction fees on Arbitrum One, at roughly 97% gross margin;
- returns from treasury management;
- Timeboost express-lane auctions;
- fees from the Arbitrum Expansion Program, or AEP, when another chain settles transactions elsewhere using Arbitrum’s stack.
Under the AEP structure, the fee is 10% of a licensee’s net protocol revenue, split 8% to the Arbitrum DAO and 2% to developers. Robinhood Chain, which went live on July 1, is the most visible example. The Defiant said it had previously covered those terms when the chain launched.
Robinhood Chain is already larger than Arbitrum’s own chain on this measure
That revenue line is now larger than Arbitrum’s own chain, according to the story. DefiLlama data shows Arbitrum One collected $17,909 in chain fees over 24 hours and $454,175 over 30 days. Robinhood Chain collected $448,616 over the same 24 hours and $37.31 million over 30 days.
DefiLlama books the difference between a chain’s fees and its revenue as Ethereum data costs plus the AEP share. On Robinhood Chain, that gap came to $3.24 million over the first 14 days of September, against $32.31 million in fees over the same stretch.
On treasury management, the note says Arbitrum deploys around $100 million of its non-ARB holdings into DeFi. About half is in ETH and derivatives, with a quarter each in real-world assets and stablecoins. The position generates roughly $200,000 to $250,000 a month in interest, according to the report.
The $2 million-a-day assumption behind September revenue
Standard Chartered estimates Arbitrum’s September revenue at around $5 million, more than five times the level seen before Robinhood Chain launched and above the prior monthly record of $4.4 million set in October 2025, when ARB averaged $0.35.
That math assumes Robinhood Chain produces $60 million of gross fees for the month, or $2 million a day. September has been running below that level. DefiLlama’s series shows the chain collected $32.31 million in fees over the first 14 days of the month, averaging $2.31 million a day, but the last seven days averaged $908,450 and Sept. 14 came in at $448,616. If the recent pace holds through month-end, September would land at roughly $47 million.
Fees peaked at $6.04 million on Sept. 4 and have fallen 93% since then. The Defiant said it had previously reported an 83% decline through Sept. 10, and that the drop continued for four more sessions while decentralized exchange volume held at $1.84 billion over the past 24 hours. The earlier surge was driven by a memecoin launchpad and a trading bot after gas on the chain rose 82-fold in 11 days.
The note also cites Token Terminal figures showing daily fee revenue that “recently touched USD 8mn” and a September average of $2.8 million. The article says Token Terminal tracks the chain on a different basis from DefiLlama.
No burn, no buyback, and fees treated as reinvested earnings
ARB is a governance token with no burn mechanism and no buyback program. Fees are “held as a form of ‘reinvested earnings,’” the note says, comparing the structure with Aave and Chainlink. It adds that “as the ecosystem matures, a token buyback programme should become more likely.”
Of ARB’s 10 billion maximum supply, 92.3% has vested, with the final tranche due in March 2027. CoinGecko data shows circulating supply at 6.678 billion.
The disconnect between revenue and token claims has been debated inside the DAO for most of the year. The report points to a $45 million funding request from the Arbitrum Foundation that delegates challenged as spending above DAO revenue.
A 1.3 multiple
Standard Chartered values Arbitrum on market capitalization against annualized three-month ecosystem fees, the same metric it applies to layer 1 networks. On that basis, ARB trades on a multiple of 1.3.
The note says the equivalent averages for Ethereum, Solana, and Avalanche are as much as 25 times higher, even though fees as a share of ecosystem activity are similar across those chains and Arbitrum.
The bank attributes the gap to investors rewarding layer 1s for being layer 1s and expects that gap to narrow. The one functional difference it highlights is that Arbitrum settles to Ethereum rather than providing its own security.
DefiLlama ranks Arbitrum second among layer 2 networks by total value locked at $1.39 billion. Including Robinhood Chain’s $936 million, that figure rises to $2.33 billion. Base stands at $5.59 billion.
Three assumptions behind the long-term forecast
The forecast rests on three projections:
- tokenized assets, including stablecoins and real-world assets, rising from about $340 billion to $4 trillion by the end of 2028;
- the share of those assets deployed in DeFi climbing from 3.5% to 30% by 2030;
- tokenized equities reaching $750 billion by the end of 2028, a 250-fold increase.
According to rwa.xyz, tokenized stocks currently carry $2.92 billion in distributed value, up 17.31% over 30 days. Ondo leads issuers at $837.4 million, followed by bStocks at $684.6 million and Backed Finance’s xStocks at $618.8 million.
Robinhood’s 189 tokenized assets total $152.0 million. The note puts Robinhood’s stock tokens at around $200 million, with $170 million on Robinhood Chain and $30 million on Arbitrum One.
Risks in the note
Standard Chartered lists a slower pace of tokenization, competition from other chains, and the lack of direct value accrual to ARB as key risks.
It also points to the unpassed Clarity Act, pending US Securities and Exchange Commission guidance, and tokenization work by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation as reasons it is hard to pick a winner.
This year, the bank has issued 2030 price targets for several DeFi tokens, including $100 for UNI, $200 for LINK, and $3,500 for AAVE. The article adds that Kendrick later said UNI’s target may be too low given activity tied to Robinhood Chain.