Standard Chartered Initiates Coverage of Chainlink with $200 Price Target by 2030
Standard Chartered has launched coverage of Chainlink, setting a price target of $200 by the end of 2030. This projection suggests a potential 25-fold increase from its current price of approximately $8, anticipating it to outperform both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same period.
Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, outlined a phased approach to this target in a note released Monday. He forecasts a price of $13 by the end of this year, followed by $41, $82, and $133, before ultimately reaching the $200 mark. The same report also projects Bitcoin to reach $500,000 and Ethereum $40,000 by the close of 2030.
Kendrick anticipates a significant surge in the value of tokenized assets on-chain, estimating a roughly 12-fold increase to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, up from the current $340 billion. Furthermore, assets deployed in decentralized finance (DeFi) are expected to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Given that Chainlink earns fees for data delivery and asset transfers between blockchains, the bank forecasts its fee revenue to increase approximately 25 times during this timeframe, with the assumption that the token’s price will mirror this fee growth.
Chainlink’s established market position is presented as another key factor supporting this outlook. The research note indicates that the total value secured by Chainlink’s oracle network exceeds $110 billion, covering approximately 70% of oracle-dependent value within the global DeFi ecosystem and over 80% on the Ethereum network. Notably, Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of this secured value.
Kendrick identified several institutions utilizing Chainlink’s services, including Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global. He expects off-chain clients to represent an increasing portion of Chainlink’s fee revenue. The report highlights that tokenized funds and bonds require net asset values, rates, and reserve attestations, making them more data-intensive than crypto-native assets.
In terms of interoperability, Chainlink is noted to still lag behind LayerZero. The report states that over $7 billion in token value has migrated from legacy bridges to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) since a $292 million exploit in April. Quarterly CCIP volume reached $4.9 billion in the second quarter, marking a 353% year-on-year increase. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO had attributed the exploit to LayerZero and intended to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization that LayerZero disputes.
This latest note follows a series of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all based on the same 37-fold growth forecast. In June, he set price targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave, followed by a $60 target for Morpho in July. Uniswap’s UNI token saw a double-digit jump after its coverage was initiated. Chainlink’s response has been more subdued, with its LINK token currently trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day, according to CoinGecko data.
The report also flagged potential risks, including slower-than-anticipated scaling of institutional tokenization, pilot programs failing to transition into recurring production workflows, increased competition from specialist providers, and technical failures that could erode confidence.
