In brief
- Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink on Monday with a price target of $200 by end-2030, up from around $8 today.
- The bank expects tokenized assets on-chain to reach $4 trillion by end-2028 and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030.
- LINK was trading at around $8.25 Monday, down 0.8% on the day, according to CoinGecko.
Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from around $8 today and outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period.
Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, laid out staged targets in a note published Monday: $13 by the end of this year, then $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, and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 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.
Chainlink's incumbency is the other half of the argument. The note puts its total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of that secured value.
Wall Street on the client list
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. Tokenized funds and bonds need net asset values, rates and reserve attestations, making them more data-hungry than crypto-native assets.
