- Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Chainlink with a $200 LINK price target for 2030.
- The bank expects tokenized assets to grow from roughly $340 billion today to $4 trillion by the end of 2028.
- The bullish thesis is based on Chainlink becoming critical infrastructure for tokenized assets, DeFi and traditional finance.
Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink and set a $200 price target for LINK by the end of 2030.
That would represent roughly a 25x increase from LINK's price of around $8 at the time of the report.
The bank's bullish thesis is largely based on the growth of tokenized real-world assets.
Standard Chartered expects the value of tokenized assets onchain to increase from roughly $340 billion today to $4 trillion by the end of 2028.
As more traditional financial assets move onchain, the bank expects demand for infrastructure providing external data, cross-chain transfers and compliance tools to increase.
Standard Chartered argues that Chainlink is currently the only platform offering all three capabilities across DeFi and traditional finance.
Chainlink already secures more than $110 billion in value and accounts for roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value across DeFi, according to the bank.
The bank also expects Chainlink's fees to grow roughly 25x by 2030 as adoption increases.
Its Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol is another major part of the thesis. CCIP processed $4.9 billion in volume during Q2, up 353% year-over-year.
Standard Chartered also highlighted Chainlink's growing institutional adoption. Companies using its infrastructure include Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global.
The bank sees three major risks to its forecast: slower-than-expected institutional adoption of tokenization, increased competition from specialized providers and technical failures that could damage confidence in Chainlink.
If tokenization takes off as expected, Standard Chartered believes Chainlink could become one of the key pieces of infrastructure powering the move of traditional finance onto blockchains.
