Standard Chartered Sets $200 Chainlink Target by End of 2030

Standard Chartered initiated formal coverage of Chainlink on Monday with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030, implying roughly a 25-fold gain from the token’s price of about $8 at publication. Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, laid out staged annual targets reaching that figure: $13 by the end of 2026, then $41, $82, and $133 in subsequent years before hitting $200. The same note projects bitcoin reaching $500,000 and ether $40,000 by end-2030, positioning Chainlink to outperform both over the period.

A $4 Trillion Tokenization Forecast

Kendrick’s thesis rests on a broader tokenization forecast the bank has built over the past year. Standard Chartered expects the value of tokenized assets on public blockchains, including stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets such as bonds, equities, and investment funds, to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, up from about $340 billion currently. The bank projects the two categories will land in roughly equal shares. Separately, Kendrick expects total value locked across DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030, a forecast that also underpins the bank’s newly set 2030 price targets of $3,500 for Aave and $100 for Uniswap.

Because Chainlink earns fees for delivering data and moving assets between blockchains, Standard Chartered estimates the network’s fee revenue should rise roughly 25-fold over the same period, and assumes LINK’s token price tracks that growth in fees rather than speculative demand alone.

Chainlink’s Existing Market Position

Chainlink’s case rests heavily on incumbency. The bank’s note puts the network’s total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value across DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum specifically; Aave’s V3 protocol alone accounts for 44% of that secured value. Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global among institutions already using Chainlink’s services, and expects revenue from these off-chain, institutional customers to become a growing share of total network fees as tokenized funds and bonds require more frequent data such as net asset values and reserve attestations.

On interoperability specifically, Chainlink still trails LayerZero in overall market share, though the bank’s note points to more than $7 billion in token value having migrated from legacy bridge providers to Chainlink’s Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) since a $292 million bridge exploit in April rattled confidence in older infrastructure. CCIP itself processed roughly $18 billion in transaction volume during the first quarter of 2026.

• Chainlink’s total value secured tops $110 billion, covering over 80% of Ethereum’s oracle-dependent DeFi activity
• More than $7 billion has migrated to CCIP from rival bridges since April’s exploit

Conclusion

Standard Chartered’s $200 target is explicitly staged and reversible rather than a single leap: each yearly milestone depends on tokenization and DeFi growth materializing roughly on the bank’s projected schedule, and on Chainlink defending its current market share as competition among oracle and interoperability providers intensifies. The bank’s forecast assumes fee growth transfers cleanly into token price appreciation, a relationship that has not been consistent historically across crypto infrastructure tokens. Whether Chainlink reaches even the first $13 milestone by year-end will offer an early signal of whether the broader thesis is tracking or falling behind schedule.