Standard Chartered Sees Chainlink Soaring to $200 by 2030

Standard Chartered has set its sights on Chainlink, initiating coverage of the decentralized oracle network with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030. This prediction represents a roughly 25-fold gain from its current price around $8.

The bank's global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, laid out staged targets in a note published Monday: $13 by the end of this year, then $41, $82 and $133 before reaching $200. The same note pencils in Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.

Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028 from about $340 billion now, with assets deployed in DeFi growing 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Because Chainlink charges for delivering data and moving assets between chains, the bank estimates its fees should rise about 25 times over that period, and assumes the token price follows fees.

Chainlink's incumbency is a key part of Kendrick's argument, with its total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of that secured value.

The note highlights the growing use of Chainlink among institutions, including Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global. Kendrick expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fees, as tokenized funds and bonds require more data than crypto-native assets.

However, the note also flags risks, including institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking share, and technical failures denting confidence. Kendrick's previous DeFi initiations have seen UNI jump double digits after its note landed, while Chainlink's response has been more muted.