Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Arbitrum's ARB token — the governance asset of the Arbitrum DAO, which oversees the Ethereum layer-2 network of the same name — projecting a price of $10 by the end of 2030 and an interim target of $0.50 before the end of this year. The bank expects ARB to outperform bitcoin and ether over that horizon, even as its own research note concedes that token holders capture little of the revenue underpinning the call.

The $10 target represents roughly 66 times ARB's trading level on Tuesday, when the token changed hands near $0.15. The bank's forecast follows a step-by-step path: $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 in 2027, $3.50 in 2028, $6.50 in 2029, and $10 in 2030.

Geoff Kendrick, who leads digital assets research at the bank, said in a note to clients that ARB should outperform the two largest cryptocurrencies over that window. The same team pegs ether at $4,000 this year and $40,000 by 2030, and bitcoin at $100,000 this year and $500,000 by 2030.

Robinhood Chain lifts Arbitrum revenue to more than 5x its pre-launch level

Kendrick's team initiated coverage of Chainlink last month with a 2030 target of $200, and has issued similar 2030 calls on Uniswap and other DeFi names. All of those calls rest on the same tokenization forecast, and each frames its token as a better performer than bitcoin and ether.

What sets Arbitrum apart, in the bank's view, is a revenue stream that began flowing in July. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, any chain built using Arbitrum technology that settles outside of Arbitrum One or Nova returns 10% of its net protocol revenue to Arbitrum.

The flagship customer is Robinhood Chain, the retail brokerage's own blockchain, which launched on July 1. On September 1, users of the network paid $3.75 million in fees, briefly pushing the two-month-old chain ahead of Ethereum mainnet and Coinbase's Base for the day.

Standard Chartered estimates Robinhood Chain's average daily fee revenue at $2.8 million across the first two weeks of September. At that pace, it forecasts Arbitrum will collect about $5 million in Expansion Program fees this month, and the bank says Arbitrum's monthly revenue now runs at more than five times its level before Robinhood Chain existed.

That rate has since cooled. Robinhood Chain fees peaked at $6.04 million on September 4 and came in at $448,616 on September 14 — the bank's $5 million monthly projection rests on the earlier, faster pace.

"We see digital assets transitioning from a state where revenue is not yet relevant to one where revenue is critical," Kendrick wrote. He added that Arbitrum's model is "heavily focused on revenue" and that the token should benefit. He also anticipates more traditional finance chains building on the same stack, raising the likelihood of additional fees and, in his view, a re-rating of ARB toward layer-1 valuations — the base blockchains, such as Ethereum, on which layer-2 networks are built.

A $4 trillion tokenization forecast underpins the call

Standard Chartered expects the value of assets flowing on-chain to rise to $4 trillion by the end of 2028 from roughly $340 billion today, with tokenized equities alone expected to reach $750 billion. Kendrick regards Arbitrum as enterprise plumbing for banks and asset managers seeking to move instruments onto blockchains, and pointed to the DTCC's work on tokenized equities — the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation clears and settles the bulk of US securities trades — and the pending Clarity Act, US legislation to set market-structure rules for digital assets, as positive developments that have not yet landed.

The $4 trillion figure is the operative assumption underlying the bank's coverage of crypto. Kendrick cited the same number in the August Chainlink call, where he set a $200 target for LINK by 2030.

Standard Chartered has flagged its own risks: tokenization could move more slowly than the model predicts, competing blockchains could capture share, and ARB captures little direct value from the fees passing through the network.

As previously reported, the Expansion Program's 10% cut is divided into 8% to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 2% to a developer guild, corresponding to roughly $1.32 million over 30 days by early September. Those funds are used to run the DAO and do not automatically flow to the pockets of ARB holders — a gap between ecosystem revenue and token-holder value that the bank itself lists among the risks to its call.