40x potential increase! Standard Chartered: UNI coin could reach $100, becoming the next wealth-building train

Standard Chartered Bank for the first time has included Uniswap in its research, predicting that its token could surge to $100 by the end of 2030, benefiting from the DeFi asset tokenization trend.

Missing the golden opportunity to get in early on Bitcoin and Ethereum—where is the next “wealth-making train”? In a newly released report, Standard Chartered predicts that Uniswap’s native token UNI could soar 40-fold from its current value of about $2.7 to $100 by the end of 2030.

In a report released on Monday, Standard Chartered for the first time included Uniswap in its research scope. The report notes that the value of tokenized assets within the DeFi ecosystem is expected to grow 37 times by the end of 2030, and that Uniswap will become the biggest winner in this wave of tokenization.

Geoffrey Kendrick, Head of Global Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered, said:

I believe that the next great leap into “generational wealth” in the digital asset space will be realized through DeFi protocols.

Geoffrey Kendrick expects that on-chain tokenized assets will grow from approximately $340 billion currently to $4 trillion by the end of 2028; the proportion flowing into the DeFi space will also jump from 3.5% to 30% by the end of 2030. If you add the growth of native crypto assets as well, the total value locked (TVL) in the DeFi ecosystem could exceed $2.7 trillion—37 times the current level. Uniswap will benefit directly too, with the size of tradable assets in its liquidity pools expected to increase by several tens of times in tandem.

Geoffrey Kendrick emphasized that if Uniswap can successfully promote commercialization and deepen cooperation with the traditional financial sector to scale up, its “market cap to trading fee multiple” (valuation multiple) will rise significantly, narrowing the valuation gap with Coinbase.

UNI future 5-year target price

Based on the bullish reasons above, Standard Chartered laid out a long-term UNI token price target path: by the end of 2026 it could reach as high as $6.5, $20 in 2027, $40 in 2028, $65 in 2029, and ultimately hit $100 by the end of 2030. Geoffrey Kendrick even believes that during this period, UNI’s performance will outperform Bitcoin and Ethereum.

When analyzing Uniswap’s business model, Geoffrey Kendrick offered a fairly interesting analogy: Uniswap is like YouTube, while Coinbase is like Netflix.

The reason is that YouTube provides an open platform where users create content themselves; whereas Uniswap provides trading infrastructure—anyone can create liquidity pools and trade tokens freely. By contrast, Coinbase is more like Netflix, with the platform managing content and infrastructure itself, belonging to a centralized operating model.

Geoffrey Kendrick believes that this model results in lower capital requirements for Uniswap (liquidity is provided by users rather than the platform itself), and gives it advantages in trading highly similar assets (such as stablecoins or staked Ether tokens) as well as listing niche tokens. He expects that tokenized real-world assets (RWA) will become another battleground for Uniswap and Coinbase to compete for users and trading activity.

Although Uniswap’s trading volume is similar to Coinbase’s, its market capitalization to trading fees ratio is far lower than Coinbase’s. Geoffrey Kendrick believes that if Uniswap can successfully build more traditional financial partners in the future and enhance its commercialization capabilities, its valuation could gradually move closer to Coinbase’s.

In addition to industry growth dividends, recent reforms to Uniswap’s tokenomics are also one of Geoffrey Kendrick’s key reasons for being bullish on UNI.

Before December 2025, all token swap fees are distributed to liquidity providers. But with the launch of the “UNIfication” upgrade, Uniswap will officially enable a protocol fee mechanism, introduce a UNI buyback and burn mechanism, and subsequent governance votes will further expand the scope of fees to cover more liquidity pools.

Since the fee switch was enabled, Uniswap has generated approximately $21 million in protocol fees and has burned about 5 million UNI tokens, equivalent to an annual burn rate of about 1%. Combined with the one-time burn of 100 million UNI, the total token supply has decreased from 1 billion to 895 million, while the circulating supply has fallen to 622 million.

3 major potential risks

Despite the optimistic outlook, Geoffrey Kendrick still raised several potential risks. First, in the future, more competitive decentralized exchanges may emerge and surpass Uniswap in certain areas. Second, to successfully capture the RWA market, Uniswap must build more mature commercialization capabilities and deepen cooperation with banks, brokerages, and asset management institutions. Third, the Hook (customizable functional module) architecture introduced by Uniswap V4 has not yet received real-world validation at the massive trading scale estimated by Standard Chartered.

However, Geoffrey Kendrick added that a clearer regulatory environment—such as the legislative progress of the U.S. “Digital Asset Market Clarity Act (Clarity Act)” or future regulatory guidance from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)—may help address some of these challenges.

• This article is reprinted with permission from: BlockBeats
• Original title: 40x Potential Rise! Standard Chartered Predicts UNI Token Could Reach $100 by 2030
• Original author: Block Sister Mel