Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030—a roughly 25-fold gain from LINK's current trading price around $8. The call comes from Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research.
Kendrick laid out staged targets for LINK in a research note: $13 by year-end, followed by $41, $82 and $133 before reaching $200. The same note forecasts Bitcoin hitting $500,000 and Ethereum reaching $40,000 by the close of 2030.
The valuation case rests on on-chain tokenization volume. Standard Chartered projects tokenized assets climb 12-fold to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, up from roughly $340 billion today. Chainlink charges fees for delivering data and moving assets between chains, and the bank estimates those fees rise about 25 times over the period—with LINK price tracking that fee growth.
DeFi assets are expected to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030, forming the other pillar of the bull case.
Chainlink's market position backs the projection. The protocol's total value secured tops $110 billion. It covers roughly 70 percent of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80 percent on Ethereum. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44 percent of that secured value.
The note lists Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global among Chainlink's institutional clients. Standard Chartered expects off-chain customers to drive a growing share of fee revenue, as tokenized funds and bonds demand net asset values, rates and reserve attestations—making them more data-intensive than crypto-native assets.
Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol has gained ground in the bridge market. More than $7 billion in token value has migrated from legacy bridges to CCIP since an April exploit. Quarterly CCIP volume hit $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353 percent year on year.
The competitive dynamics are shifting. KelpDAO said in May that a $292 million April exploit it attributed to LayerZero prompted the protocol to rebuild on Chainlink—a characterization LayerZero disputes.
This Chainlink initiation follows a series of DeFi reports from Kendrick, all built on the same 37-fold DeFi growth forecast. He set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July.
Market reaction has been mixed. UNI jumped double digits after its note landed. LINK is trading at $8.25, down 0.8 percent on the day, according to CoinGecko data. Bitcoin trades at $64,964 and Ethereum at $1,916.
Standard Chartered flags the key risks: institutional tokenization scaling slower than projected, pilot programs failing to convert to recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking market share, and technical failures eroding confidence.
