Standard Chartered Expands Institutional Research to DeFi and On-Chain Infrastructure

Standard Chartered is expanding its institutional research coverage to include decentralized finance (DeFi) and on-chain infrastructure projects. Since mid-June, the bank has initiated coverage on seven DeFi and on-chain infrastructure projects, including Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Chainlink, Sky, Arbitrum, and Ethena.

These reports cover various aspects of DeFi, such as decentralized trading, lending, stablecoin issuance, data infrastructure, and blockchain execution. The bank's models for revenue, usage, token economics, and valuation for each project provide a deeper understanding of their financials.

The emergence of this research universe indicates a shift in the way crypto research is conducted. Instead of focusing on individual tokens, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, institutions are now looking to understand the sector-level analysis of DeFi projects.

Standard Chartered's research expansion is part of a broader commercial push into digital assets. The bank has launched deliverable institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading, offers digital-asset custody, and has worked with BlackRock and OKX on tokenized money-market assets as collateral.

The bank's research is concentrated around Ethereum, with five of the seven projects it has initiated coverage on being related to the Ethereum ecosystem. However, the bank has also identified the shift in Solana's decentralized exchange flows, with stablecoins turning over two to three times faster than on Ethereum.