Standard Chartered opens to AAVE up to $3,500? That target price looks like science fiction, but if the RWA narrative really takes off, it’s not impossible for the leading players to benefit from the dividends. Just keeping an eye on Horizon’s progress for now.

Standard Chartered Bank’s head of digital asset research, Geoff Kendrick, is covering the DeFi lending protocol Aave for the first time and has set a $3,500 target price for the AAVE token by end of 2030. The report says Aave has largely moved on from the impact of the KelpDAO-related incident in April this year, and is expected to benefit from the DeFi recovery and the growth of tokenized real-world assets (RWA). Kendrick expects that by 2030 the size of tokenized assets active in DeFi will grow by about 37 times, and that Aave, as a leading on-chain lending platform, is likely to continue to benefit. The report also mentions the restart of Aave’s buyback program, and that the Horizon project aimed at institutional RWA lending could become a growth catalyst. (CoinDesk)