Standard Chartered Deepens DeFi Research Coverage with Seven New Initiatives

Standard Chartered is expanding its institutional research coverage to include DeFi projects and on-chain infrastructure, marking a significant shift in crypto research. Since mid-June, the bank has initiated coverage on seven DeFi or on-chain infrastructure projects: Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Chainlink, Sky, Arbitrum, and Ethena.

These reports span decentralized trading, lending, stablecoin issuance, data infrastructure, and blockchain execution, with individual models for revenue, usage, token economics, and valuation. Standard Chartered's research aims to provide a sector-level analysis, similar to what institutional investors use to compare businesses, risks, and returns.

The bank's research expansion is part of its broader digital-assets strategy, which includes custody, execution, tokenization, interoperability, and research. This commercial interest is crucial context, as Standard Chartered has businesses positioned to benefit from institutions trading, custodianship, financing, and tokenizing more assets.

The bank's protocol universe has a clear center of gravity, with Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Sky, and Ethena all growing out of Ethereum's DeFi market. Standard Chartered expects tokenized assets to reach about $4 trillion by the end of 2028, with a growing share eventually becoming active inside DeFi.

Solana is another important player in the DeFi space, with Standard Chartered noting that its decentralized exchange flows are moving from memecoin trading toward stablecoin pairs and micropayments. However, the bank has not extended its research to comparable coverage of Solana protocols, leaving its DeFi universe concentrated around Ethereum.