Standard Chartered Predicts Uniswap Token to Soar Fortyfold as Wall Street Embraces On-Chain Finance
London, UK – Uniswap’s native token, UNI, is projected to experience a nearly fortyfold increase in value over the coming years, potentially outperforming both Bitcoin and Ethereum as Wall Street firms increasingly migrate to on-chain operations, according to Geoff Kendrick, global head of digital assets at Standard Chartered.
Kendrick, in a note released Monday, posited that Uniswap, a leading decentralized exchange (DEX) and a cornerstone of decentralized finance (DeFi), is strategically positioned to capitalize on an anticipated surge of digital assets representing traditional investments. He has set a price target of $100 for UNI by 2030.
This optimistic outlook is underpinned by Uniswap’s inherent structural neutrality, which allows financial institutions to build on its platform with assurance that the underlying rules will remain consistent as tokenized assets gain traction. Kendrick drew a parallel, likening Uniswap’s role to that of YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix in their respective industries.
“For TradFi institutions, Uniswap should be viewed less as a retail DEX app and more as market infrastructure that TradFi can integrate with once tokenized assets scale and TradFi operators want to plug them into DeFi,” Kendrick elaborated.
On Monday, UNI was trading around $2.72, marking a 9.8% gain over the preceding 24 hours, according to data from CoinGecko. While Uniswap’s platform has long been a dominant force in the DEX landscape, its associated token’s price reached a high of approximately $45 five years ago.
Since its inception in 2018, Uniswap has facilitated over $3.7 trillion in trading volume and generated $5.6 billion in fees, as reported by DeFiLlama.
Standard Chartered forecasts that by the end of the decade, the total value of digital assets deposited or staked in DeFi protocols will reach $2.7 trillion. Consequently, Kendrick anticipates that liquidity pools on Uniswap could hold 37 times more assets for on-chain trading.
He further noted a direct correlation between Uniswap’s protocol fees and trading volumes. As tokenized assets become more prevalent on-chain, the platform’s “UNIfication” upgrade, slated for late 2025, is expected to trigger programmatic token burns, thereby reducing supply.
Kendrick pointed out that UNI’s total supply has already decreased from 1 trillion to approximately 895 million since the activation of protocol fees in December. This supply reduction has been further amplified by a significant retroactive token burn and an ongoing annualized burn rate of roughly 1%.
Despite its established position in the DeFi ecosystem, Kendrick acknowledged that Uniswap faces potential risks from smaller competitors capable of developing more specialized and competitive solutions. Additionally, he highlighted the possibility of regulatory headwinds stemming from the establishment of compliance frameworks for tokenization.
Nevertheless, Kendrick observed that a viable pathway for tokenized assets to utilize decentralized settlement mechanisms is beginning to materialize. In February, BlackRock announced that its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, would be accessible through UniswapX, an auction-based swapping protocol, with the assets being issued via the tokenization platform Securitize.
At the time of that announcement, the world’s largest asset manager intended to acquire UNI tokens, according to a person familiar with the matter who spoke to Decrypt. Kendrick’s immediate price projection for UNI is $6.50 by the end of the current year.
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