Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Chainlink with a price target of $200 by the end of 2030, implying a roughly 25-fold gain from current levels around $8. The target suggests LINK would outperform both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period.

LINK was trading at approximately $8.25 on Monday, down 0.8% on the day, according to CoinGecko.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, laid out staged price targets in a note published Monday: $13 by the end of this year, followed by $41, $82, and $133 before reaching $200. The same note projects Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ethereum at $40,000 by end-2030.

Tokenization and DeFi Growth Forecasts

Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028, up from approximately $340 billion today. He also forecasts assets deployed in DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Since Chainlink charges fees for delivering data and moving assets between blockchains, Standard Chartered estimates the protocol's fees should rise about 25 times over that period, with the token price expected to track fees.

Chainlink operates as a decentralized oracle network, supplying smart contracts with real-world data such as asset prices, interest rates, and event outcomes that blockchains cannot natively access. This positioning places it at the intersection of two projected growth trends: the expansion of on-chain financial activity and the migration of traditional assets to tokenized form.

Chainlink's incumbency underpins the bank's thesis. The note places its total value secured above $110 billion, covering roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value in DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum. Aave V3 alone accounts for 44% of that secured value.

Institutional Client Base

Kendrick named Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JP Morgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global among institutions using Chainlink services. The bank expects off-chain customers to become a growing share of fee revenue, noting that tokenized funds and bonds require net asset values, rates, and reserve attestations, making them more data-intensive than crypto-native assets.

On interoperability, the note acknowledges that Chainlink still trails LayerZero. However, more than $7 billion in token value has migrated from legacy bridges to Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) since a $292 million exploit in April. Quarterly CCIP volume reached $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year on year. Decrypt reported in May that KelpDAO blamed LayerZero for that exploit and planned to rebuild on Chainlink, a characterization LayerZero disputes.

Latest in a Series of DeFi Initiations

The note follows earlier DeFi coverage from Kendrick built on the same 37-fold growth forecast. He set targets of $100 for Uniswap and $3,500 for Aave in June, and $60 for Morpho in July. UNI jumped double digits after its respective note was published, while Chainlink's market response has been more muted.

Risks cited in the note include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to transition into recurring production workflows, specialist providers capturing market share, and technical failures undermining confidence.