Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 price target for the end of 2030, a level that implies roughly a 25x gain from around $8 today. The bank said that would leave LINK outperforming both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same period.
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, set out a stepped path for the token in a note published Monday: $13 by the end of this year, then $41, $82, and $133 before reaching $200 at the end of 2030. The same note places Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.
Tokenization and DeFi growth anchor the forecast
Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to rise about 12-fold from roughly $340 billion now to $4 trillion by the end of 2028. He also projects assets deployed in decentralized finance, or DeFi, to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030.
Because Chainlink charges for delivering data and moving assets between blockchains, Standard Chartered estimates its fees should increase about 25 times over that stretch. The bank’s assumption is that LINK’s price will move in line with those fees.
Incumbency is a central part of the case
The note says Chainlink’s existing position is the other key part of the argument. It puts Chainlink’s total value secured at more than $110 billion, covering about 70% of oracle-dependent value in global DeFi and more than 80% of that value on Ethereum.
Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of the value secured, according to the note.
Wall Street names already on the client list
Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global among institutions using Chainlink services. He expects off-chain customers to make up a growing share of fees over time.
The note argues that tokenized funds and bonds need net asset values, rates, and reserve attestations, which makes them more data-hungry than crypto-native assets.
CCIP adoption grows, but LayerZero still leads interoperability
On interoperability, the report says Chainlink still trails LayerZero. At the same time, it notes that more than $7 billion in token value has moved from legacy bridges to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol, or CCIP, since a $292 million exploit in April.
Quarterly CCIP volume reached $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year over year. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization that LayerZero disputes.
Latest DeFi call in Kendrick’s recent series
The Chainlink note is the latest in a series of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all built on the same 37-fold growth forecast. In June, he set a $100 target for Uniswap and a $3,500 target for Aave by 2030. In July, he set a $60 target for Morpho.
UNI rose by double digits after that Uniswap note was released. LINK’s market reaction has been more restrained. According to CoinGecko data, LINK is currently trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day.
Risks listed in the note
Standard Chartered flagged several risks to the thesis: institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilot programs failing to turn into recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking market share, and technical failures hurting confidence.