Standard Chartered projects Chainlink's LINK token will reach $200 by end of 2030, a 25-fold increase from $8 when the bank issued its forecast on Aug. 10, 2026. The projection hinges on tokenized real-world assets reaching $4 trillion by end of 2028.
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered's global head of digital asset research, said the expansion will generate demand for on-chain data feeds—Chainlink's core fee-generating service. The oracle network will need to securely deliver verified pricing and event data across blockchains as institutional tokenization scales.
Standard Chartered also forecasts a 37-fold expansion in tokenized and crypto-native assets across DeFi, reaching $2.7 trillion by end of 2030. DEXs already show the trend: tokenized RWAs posted $141 billion in trading volume on decentralized exchanges during July, a 19.5 percent jump from June, per CryptoRank, with public equities leading volume.
Kendrick cited infrastructure requirements: trusted data feeds, cross-chain interoperability, privacy-preserving compliance, and integrations with traditional finance. "Only Chainlink is currently equipped to provide" these capabilities at scale, Kendrick said.
Chainlink secures $34.4 billion in total value locked, per DefiLlama. Chronicle, the second-largest oracle by TVL, secures $7.36 billion. Chainlink's decentralized oracle network delivers external data—asset prices, event outcomes—to smart contracts, enabling tokenized assets to reflect real-world value and allowing DeFi protocols to operate with reliable off-chain information.
Risks to the forecast include slower institutional tokenization adoption, competition from specialist oracle providers, and technical setbacks for Chainlink. LINK trades at $11.50, down 0.44 percent in the past 24 hours.
