Author: The Defiant Team Translator: Shan Oppa, Golden Finance

Standard Chartered Bank’s Global Research Department officially covers Uniswap, the leading decentralized exchange, for the first time. Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital asset research, positioned Uniswap as a core trading hub in the wave of tokenization of real-world assets and gave a target price: UNI tokens will rise to $100 by the end of 2030, an increase of approximately 40 times from the current price.

Standard Chartered Bank’s research department took the lead in conducting research on Uniswap, the world’s largest decentralized exchange. Its research thesis is that Uniswap’s governance token is closely related to the wave of institutional tokenization. Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital asset research, believes that as banks move real-world assets onto the chain, Uniswap is expected to become a trading center for tokenized real-world assets.

The report, dated June 15, forecasts a price target of $100 for UNI by the end of 2030, which would represent a roughly 40-fold increase from Monday’s trading price of $2.70. Kendrick expects UNI to outperform Ethereum and Bitcoin during this period. This prediction is based on a structural assumption: the size of on-chain tokenized assets will swell to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, and an increasing number of these assets will be traded through DeFi platforms, and Uniswap is the default infrastructure for these platforms.

Tokenization to DeFi Pipeline

Kendrick’s case begins with the provision of tokenized tools. Standard Chartered expects the on-chain stock of tokenized real-world assets, excluding stablecoins, to reach $2 trillion by 2028, with tokenized money market funds and U.S. equities leading this growth. If stablecoins are included, the total stock of tokenized assets would reach approximately $4 trillion over the same period.

The second stage is the rise of DeFi. Kendrick estimates that about 3.5% of tokenized assets currently exist in DeFi protocols, and that this proportion will climb to 30% by 2030. Based on these assumptions, the total value locked in DeFi will reach $2.7 trillion by the end of this decade, a 37x increase from current levels. The bank sees this inflow as the next stage in digital asset wealth creation, with DeFi protocols being the main beneficiaries.

Why choose Uniswap

The report specifically pointed out that Uniswap performs well in terms of scale, brand and historical heritage. Kendrick emphasized that the exchange has successfully operated through multiple market cycles and has been recognized by numerous institutions that prioritize security and trust when settling tokenized assets on-chain.

On-chain data confirms this argument. Uniswap’s V4 and V3 versions combined cleared more spot trading volume than any other decentralized exchange over the past week, with Uniswap V4 alone accounting for $5.35 billion in volume over seven days (data from DefiLlama). The protocol has a total of $2.88 billion in value locked on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, and other chains. Among them, Ethereum accounts for approximately 68% of the total value of the Base chain.

Kendrick also makes a valuation argument. He pointed out that if Uniswap reaches cooperation with enough traditional financial companies to expand its commercial scale, the gap between its market capitalization and its fee income may narrow, and its valuation discount relative to Coinbase may also decrease. UNI's fully diluted valuation is approximately $2.4 billion, while its float market capitalization is nearly $1.68 billion.

Notes

This report does not consider this path to be automatically implemented. Standard Chartered Bank reminds that tokenization itself does not guarantee liquidity, and issuance of the same asset in different forms on multiple blockchains may cause market fragmentation and create price differences. This fragmentation risk is where the gap lies between tokenized supply projections and the volume theory underpinning UNI’s goals.

The $100 price target is also still one bank's forecast, and it's far more aggressive than most banks' forecasts. UNI is currently trading about 94% down from its all-time high of $44.92 in May 2021 and is also down about 23% in the past 30 days, making its target price significantly higher than anything the coin has traded at in the past three years.

Tokenization has become a consensus among financial institutions

When Standard Chartered released this first coverage research report, many large banks have regarded asset tokenization as a long-term trend of trillions of dollars. Citibank predicted this month that the global tokenized securities market will reach $5.5 trillion in 2030, relying on tokenized treasury bonds, stocks and a $1.9 trillion stablecoin market.

In April this year, the Standard Chartered Digital Assets team also expressed its views on the Kelp security incident, saying that the crisis has allowed the DeFi industry to complete structural optimization, showing "anti-fragile" characteristics, and the overall strength of the industry has been enhanced.

Currently, Uniswap has been deeply integrated into the on-chain layout of traditional institutions. This month, asset management giant Fidelity deployed the liquidity of its U.S. dollar stablecoin into the capital pools of Uniswap and Curve. This is also an early implementation case of "traditional financial assets flowing to decentralized exchanges" mentioned by Kendrick in the research report.

Additional note: This report is a paid internal research report for institutions, and Standard Chartered Bank has not released the full version to the public.