Standard Chartered Bank has set a target price of $200 for Chainlink and $100 for Uniswap in 2030

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Standard Chartered Bank released a Chainlink coverage report, setting a 2030 LINK target price of US$200.

Standard Chartered Bank, a London-based multinational bank, recently officially launched a coverage study on Chainlink and set an ambitious target price of US$200 for LINK by the end of 2030. The bank expects this forecast to significantly outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same period. As of Monday, LINK was trading at about $8.25, which would mean about 25 times room for gain if the target was achieved.

Chainlink Goals and Market Insights

Jeff Kendrick, global head of digital asset research at Standard Chartered Bank, set a series of price milestones for LINK in a research report. Kendrick's roadmap predicts that LINK will reach $13 by the end of the year, then hit mid-term targets of $41,$82 and $133, eventually reaching $200 in 2030. For comparison, the same report predicts Bitcoin and Ethereum prices of $500,000 and $40,000 respectively at the end of 2030.

Kendrick expects asset tokenization to expand significantly, predicting that the on-chain value of tokenized assets will increase from the current approximately US$340 billion to US$4 trillion by the end of 2028. He further predicted that assets deployed in decentralized finance would surge 37 times to reach US$2.7 trillion by 2030.

The bank believes that Chainlink's revenue model directly benefits from the growth of tokenized assets and DeFi assets. Since Chainlink charges fees for transmitting data across blockchains and facilitating asset transfers, Standard Chartered estimates that its fees could climb 25 times from current levels, assuming that token prices will change as fees grow.

Chainlink currently guarantees a total value of more than US$110 billion, covering approximately 70% of the world's DeFi value that relies on oracles, and on Ethereum, this proportion exceeds 80%. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of its protection value.

Standard Chartered Bank also highlighted Chainlink's extensive partnerships, listing major institutions such as Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan Chase, MasterCard, UBS, Fidelity and S & P Global. The bank expects business from off-chain customers-such as tokenized funds and bonds that require net asset values, interest rates and certification-to account for an increasing share of Chainlink's fee revenue in the future.

Mini Dictionary: Chainlink is a decentralized network of oracle machines that provides real-world data to the blockchain and facilitates secure communication between different blockchain platforms. Oracles are crucial to the operation of DeFi and tokenized asset markets.

Competition and security considerations

Despite its solid position, Chainlink still faces competition in blockchain interoperability. Kendrick's report states that Chainlink currently lags behind LayerZero in terms of interoperability capabilities. However, since a $292 million security incident in April, more than $7 billion in token value has been transferred from the older cross-chain bridge to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP). In the second quarter, CCIP transaction volume reached US$4.9 billion, a year-on-year increase of 353%.

Tensions between LayerZero and Chainlink remain after the incident of April last year. After the incident, KelpDAO said it would transition from LayerZero to Chainlink, but LayerZero denied that its agreement was responsible for the loss.

* Current BTC and ETH prices are approximate values and are not explicitly specified in the original text.

Uniswap and DeFi rise on bullish forecasts

The coverage report has fueled renewed bullish sentiment in the DeFi sector. Uniswap's governance token, UNI, has climbed to a local high of $3.70 in the past day, up nearly 20%. UNI is currently trading at $3.63, up about 48% this week, pushing the total market value of Uniswap to $2.26 billion, with daily trading volume close to $864 million.

Standard Chartered's optimism focuses not only on Chainlink, but also on the leading DeFi protocol. Kendrick set a price target of $100 for Uniswap,$3500 for Aave and $60 for Morpho in his June report, all of which are based on his model, which predicts assets deployed in DeFi will grow 37-fold by 2030. Although LINK's response was muted, UNI rose sharply after the report was released.

Identified risks include: institutional tokenization is slower than expected, pilot projects are difficult to transition to regular processes, professional competitors gain market share, and unforeseen technical failures that undermine trust.

Currently, investor optimism has boosted some DeFi assets as the market digests new goals and growth forecasts.