Standard Chartered Initiates Chainlink Coverage With $200 Price Target by 2030

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink on Monday with a price target of $200 by end-2030, up from around $8 today.

The bank expects tokenized assets on-chain to reach $4 trillion by end-2028 and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030.

LINK was trading at around $8.25 Monday, down 0.8% on the day, according to CoinGecko.

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from around $8 today and outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, 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, and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 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 the other half of the argument. The note puts 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.

Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global among institutions using Chainlink services, and expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fees. Tokenized funds and bonds need net asset values, rates and reserve attestations, making them more data-hungry than crypto-native assets.

On interoperability, Chainlink still trails LayerZero. The note says more than $7 billion in token value has moved from legacy bridges to Chainlink's CCIP since a $292 million exploit in April, with quarterly CCIP volume reaching $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year on year. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization LayerZero disputes.

The note is the latest in a run of DeFi initiations from Kendrick, all built on the same 37-fold forecast. He set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July. UNI jumped double digits after its note landed. Chainlink’s response has been more muted, with LINK currently trading at $8.25, down 0.8% on the day, per CoinGecko data.

Risks flagged in the note include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking share, and technical failures denting confidence.