Standard Chartered Bank opens a 40x "betting pool," calling for UNI to rise to $100

Author: Jae, PANews

A traditional bank research report ignited the somewhat quiet DeFi sector.

Standard Chartered's Global Digital Asset Research Head Geoff Kendrick published his first coverage report on DEX (Decentralized Exchange) Uniswap on June 15, and offered an aggressive prediction that drew the crypto market’s attention: the price of Uniswap’s governance token UNI would surge about 40 times by the end of 2030, reaching the $100 mark.

At that time, UNI’s trading price was only about $2.6.

Once mocked as an “air governance token,” UNI is now being revalued by Wall Street as a productive asset with network effects. Although the 40x long-term narrative is enticing enough, the journey to the target may not be smooth sailing.

Wall Street’s 40x Growth Script for UNI: Four Numbers, One Main Line

In Standard Chartered’s deconstruction logic, Uniswap is being embedded into a valuation framework that deeply integrates traditional finance with the on-chain world.

RWA Tokenization Exponential Expansion (340 billion → 4 trillion)

The starting point of growth is the wave of RWA (Real-World Assets) being tokenized on-chain. Standard Chartered predicts that the global on-chain tokenized asset market will experience exponential growth, soaring from the current approximately $340 billion to $4 trillion by the end of 2028. Asset management giants like Fidelity and BlackRock are moving traditional assets such as stocks, government bonds, and money market funds onto the blockchain in bulk, and the liquidity of on-chain tokenized assets will expand at a rate far exceeding industry expectations.

This effectively creates a larger reservoir for the DeFi sector: asset size is built up first, providing enough targets for subsequent trading, lending, staking, and other financial activities.

DeFi Penetration Rate (3.5% → 30%) Boosts TVL (37x)

Tokenizing assets on-chain is just the first step; stagnant water must become flowing water. Simply put, only when assets circulate within DeFi protocols can they generate protocol revenue and value. Standard Chartered estimates that currently only about 3.5% of tokenized assets are invested in DeFi ecosystems, and this ratio will increase to 30% by 2030.

Driven by the growth of native crypto assets and RWA entering the chain, the overall DeFi TVL (Total Value Locked) will skyrocket 37 times from current levels, reaching approximately $2.7 trillion by 2030.

Fee Switch Provides Price Support (40x)

As the main liquidity hub on-chain, Uniswap will be the biggest beneficiary of this capital influx, with its token UNI’s price rising from $2.6 to $100, gaining nearly 40 times.

Standard Chartered’s long-term price path for UNI is: end of 2026 at $6.5 → end of 2027 at $20 → end of 2028 at $40 → end of 2029 at $65 → end of 2030 at $100.

In the past, UNI was dubbed a “air token” because it only had governance rights and lacked cash flow capture ability. Last year, Uniswap activated the fee switch, officially entering a deflationary era for UNI.

The research report pointed out that on December 28 last year, Uniswap burned 100 million UNI tokens in one go, and an additional 5 million UNI tokens, reducing the total supply from 1 billion to 895 million, with circulating supply also dropping to 622 million. This contraction in supply will support UNI’s price.

Additionally, Uniswap generated about $21 million in protocol fees. The linear relationship between fees and trading volume means that as tokenized assets flood into the protocol, the fee switch will automatically trigger more burns. This indicates that UNI is shifting from a “pure governance tool” to a “deflationary productive asset,” directly narrowing the valuation gap with listed exchanges like Coinbase.

Interestingly, Geoffrey Kendrick also made a vivid business analogy in the report: comparing Uniswap to YouTube, and Coinbase to Netflix.

• Coinbase (Netflix model): Centralized operation, heavy asset investment, requiring substantial capital support, listing and compliance involve multiple layers of screening, high marginal costs for expansion, and limited asset categories;

• Uniswap (YouTube model): Open liquidity pool architecture, where any user can be a “content creator” (liquidity provider). The platform doesn’t need to incur high costs for asset onboarding. In scenarios like stablecoin trading, derivative staking, niche tokens, this open model’s network effects and long-tail advantages are difficult for centralized exchanges (CEX) to match.

This increasingly prosperous dual-sided effect is the moat that allows Uniswap to maintain its long-term leading position.

More importantly, Standard Chartered believes that Uniswap is not just a simple “retail DEX app,” but a set of integrable market infrastructure. Once RWA scales up, traditional financial institutions can directly “insert” assets into Uniswap’s liquidity pools for trading. This functionality is something traditional financial markets cannot achieve on their own.

Uniswap Becomes the First Choice Interface for Traditional Funds but Faces Competition from Emerging DEXs and Aggregators

Wall Street’s long-term outlook is compelling, but the actual situation in the crypto market is not as smooth as the linear growth depicted in the report.

Since its founding in 2018, Uniswap has accumulated over $3.7 trillion in trading volume, with total fees reaching $5.6 billion, and TVL around $40k.

In terms of market share, Uniswap’s DEX throne remains secure. Whether on the Ethereum mainnet or various Layer 2 ecosystems, Uniswap’s trading volume and liquidity depth are dominant, with no competitors posing a substantial threat.

A more critical signal comes from the institutional side. In February this year, BlackRock’s tokenized money market fund BUIDL announced the launch of trading on UniswapX and strategically bought UNI tokens. With the popularity of UniswapX, which introduces features like off-chain routing, gasless trading, and MEV resistance, the user experience gap between DEXs and CEXs has been greatly narrowed, making it the preferred on-chain gateway for traditional funds.

Coincidentally, last Friday (June 12), Fidelity also deployed liquidity for its stablecoin FIDD on Uniswap. The protocol’s concentrated liquidity model is currently the most efficient on-chain pricing mechanism. Once compliant RWA assets are widely tokenized, Uniswap could become the “NYSE on-chain,” holding the power to influence asset pricing.

The waters of Wall Street are flowing onto the chain. Uniswap is the faucet. Institutions are increasingly using Uniswap as the on-chain interface for compliant assets, and UNI is aligning with the pricing logic of “on-chain routing infrastructure.”

Despite the enticing vision of $100, two major obstacles still stand in Uniswap’s path to the peak, potentially delaying or even nullifying this long-term check.

• Competition risk from emerging DEXs and aggregators (traffic hijacking): Solana-based DEXs like Jupiter and Raydium, driven by meme hype and ultra-low trading costs, are siphoning off retail traffic. Meanwhile, aggregators like 1inch and CowSwap intercept users at the front end, turning Uniswap into a “backend liquidity pool,” continuously weakening its brand premium and user perception.

• Delay in tokenization adoption (macro risk): Standard Chartered’s valuation heavily relies on the assumption that “DeFi TVL reaches $2.7 trillion by 2030.” If global legislation on tokenization progresses slower than expected, or if large-scale security incidents or systemic risks occur, the pace of RWA penetration will slow significantly, and the realization of this grand narrative could be severely delayed.

Looking at the most direct price aspect, UNI’s current trading price is below $3, down over 92% from its all-time high in May 2021.

The fee switch has introduced deflation but has not reversed the price trend. Market apathy toward DeFi narratives, liquidity drying up, and high macro interest rates all put heavy pressure on UNI’s valuation.

However, this may be precisely the “40x space” that Standard Chartered sees: starting from a low base.

Standard Chartered’s first coverage of UNI and its $100 target price carry more symbolic significance than the price itself. In fact, whether the prediction is accurate or not is less important; what matters is that Wall Street’s perception of DeFi is shifting: from early “wild growth and speculative bubbles” to a rational business judgment focused on “capital efficiency, network effects, and cash flow value.”

It’s worth noting that Wall Street research reports tend to emphasize macro logic but often overlook micro risks. For investors caught in the game, the 40x target is tempting, but the road to 2030 will undoubtedly be fraught with thorns.

Whether UNI can truly harness the $4 trillion tokenization dividend depends on how well it can perform this high-difficulty dance between decentralization principles and global regulatory compliance.

Compared to a 40x increase, a four-year wait is a true test of faith.