Key Takeaways:
Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 price target by 2030, betting a $4 trillion tokenization market will drive a roughly 25-fold gain.
Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 price target by end-2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from LINK's current price near $8.
Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, laid out staged targets in a note titled "Chainlink – Owning the rails" 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 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.
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 jumped double digits after its note landed. LINK's response has been more muted, with the token trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day, per CoinGecko data.
Kendrick called Chainlink the market leader in bringing data on-chain through decentralized oracles, which feed outside information such as prices to blockchains. 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. The bank also credits Chainlink with enabling over $32 trillion in transaction value across seven years of operation.
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. Fidelity is working with Chainlink on a project to tokenize fund data covering $6.9 billion in assets.
On interoperability, Chainlink still trails LayerZero. 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. KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization LayerZero disputes.
Risks flagged in the note include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking share, and technical failures denting confidence.
For LINK holders, the thesis converts network usage into fees and, in turn, token demand. Whether Chainlink becomes the settlement layer of tokenized finance — collecting a fee on every crossing — or another bold bank call that never materializes will hinge on tokenization moving from pilots into production at scale.
This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice.
