Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, says tokenization is now “100% locked in.” As traditional finance moves on-chain, he expects four altcoins to capture a large share of the money that follows: Uniswap (UNI), Aave (AAVE), Morpho (MORPHO) and Arbitrum (ARB).
Uniswap: $100 by 2030 “may be too low”
Kendrick set a year-end target of $6.50 on UNI in June, when it traded below $3. The token has since moved above $9, and he now says his 2030 target of $100 may be too low.
His case rests on the fee switch that Uniswap turned on last December, which uses trading fees to buy back and burn tokens. Activity from Robinhood Chain pushed the burn sharply higher over the summer. He also sees a strong moat. Rivals such as Aerodrome paid users to switch, but once the rewards stopped, users moved back. Kendrick admitted his burn theory rests on “literally one data point.”
Aave: $3,500 by 2030, even after a $300 million hack
Aave was hit indirectly by a roughly $300 million exploit linked to Kelp in April. Kendrick said the response made him more confident. The community raised about $300 million, mostly in ETH, founder tightened risk settings, and liquidity returned within weeks.
He calls Aave the leader in “on-chain banking.” At its peak last year, he said, it would have ranked as roughly the 35th largest bank in the US. AAVE was trading near $170 at the time, close to his year-end target of $180, which he now thinks is too low.
Morpho: $60 target and a different business from Aave
Kendrick does not see the two as direct rivals. Aave works like a bank, taking deposits and lending them out. Morpho, through its vault product, is closer to a platform for asset managers. “Both can be successful,” he said.
Morpho is mostly held by venture funds, so its token is less volatile and less liquid than AAVE, which is driven by retail traders. He expects it to win the on-chain asset management space over the medium term.
Arbitrum: $10 by 2030, his biggest call
Kendrick’s $10 target was about 70 times ARB’s price when he published it, and the token is up more than 60% since. Arbitrum receives 10% of net revenue from Robinhood Chain because it supplied the technology. That lifted its monthly revenue from about $1 million to an estimated $4 million to $5 million in September.
If four or five more firms copy Robinhood’s model, he said, that figure could reach $40 million to $50 million a month within two years. He also argued that Arbitrum trades at a valuation multiple about 30 times lower than layer 1 networks such as Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche.
