Standard Chartered initiated coverage of UNI, Uniswap’s governance token, with a price target of $100 by the end of 2030 — a roughly 40-fold increase from the token’s level of approximately $2.50 at the time of the report, per a note published June 15 by Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research.
The bank laid out a staged trajectory: $6.50 by end-2026, $20 in 2027, $40 in 2028, $65 in 2029, and $100 in 2030. Kendrick framed Uniswap as the clearest on-chain infrastructure play on the tokenization of traditional finance, arguing the protocol’s structural neutrality gives institutional partners confidence that its underlying rules will not shift as tokenized assets scale. The note was part of a broader package that also set 2030 targets of $500,000 for BTC and $40,000 for ETH, but the UNI call drew the sharpest attention for its scale relative to current price.
The core thesis rests on the growth of tokenized real-world assets. Per the report, Standard Chartered projects total tokenized assets expanding from roughly $340 billion today to $4 trillion by end-2028, with total value locked in DeFi reaching $2.7 trillion by 2030. Uniswap’s automated market maker model and leading decentralized exchange volume share position it to capture a meaningful share of fee revenue as traditional financial instruments migrate on-chain. The protocol currently powers approximately 31% of MetaMask swaps on Ethereum mainnet.
Uniswap’s own fundamentals support the structural argument. On June 13, the protocol launched tokenized shares of SpaceX, Apple, Tesla, and Nvidia directly on its main interface and API. Since its December 2025 fee upgrade, the protocol has burned 5 million UNI tokens — at an annual burn rate of roughly 1% — and generated $21 million in protocol revenue, reducing total supply from 1 billion to 895 million. Lifetime cumulative trading volume stands at $4.4 trillion, with the protocol earning $53 million in user fees over the past 30 days alone.
The market response was swift. UNI surged more than 25% in the sessions following publication, with volume rising above $561 million on its strongest day. The token remains down roughly 38% year-to-date and over 92% from its 2021 all-time high, reflecting the distance the thesis requires. Not all observers are convinced: investor Simon Dedic described the targets as “on the delusional side” while conceding the tokenized asset thesis has structural merit. Standard Chartered’s institutional weight behind the call, however, signals that DeFi protocols with genuine revenue and clear product-market fit are entering the coverage universe of major financial research desks — a shift that matters beyond any single price target.
