AAVE Eyed As Next Cycle’s Biggest DeFi Winner With $3,500 Target — Standard Chartered

Aave (AAVE) jumped 15% on Wednesday, hitting levels not seen since May, and bucking a broader market sell-off that dragged Bitcoin (BTC) and the broader crypto market lower. Behind the move was a report from Standard Chartered’s Head of Digital Assets Research, Geoff Kendrick, who set a major price target on the token.

The Case For AAVE

Kendrick argued that AAVE could reach $3,500 by the end of 2030, which would represent an increase of over 4,168% from current prices of around $82. If this target is met, he said, AAVE would likely outperform both Bitcoin and Ethereum (ETH) over this period.

Backing his thesis, Kendrick believes Aave has already absorbed and moved past the impact of an incident that rattled the decentralized Finance (DeFi) ecosystem back in April with the KelpDAO exploit, which significantly took a hit to Aave’s total value locked (TVL). 

In his view, the protocol still holds a dominant position in decentralized lending — a sector that allows users to borrow and lend crypto without going through a bank — and is well placed to capture a larger share of capital as investor appetite for DeFi returns.

The bigger call, though, is about the direction of the entire tokenized asset market. Standard Chartered forecasts that the value of real-world assets (RWAs) deployed across DeFi will grow roughly 37-fold to reach $2.7 trillion by 2030. 

That growth, the bank argues, will be driven by the expansion of stablecoins, increased participation from traditional financial institutions, and rising crypto prices across the board. 

Because Aave’s core business is directly tied to lending and deposit activity, a dramatic expansion in overall DeFi utilization would feed directly into the protocol’s revenue and the value of its token.

Where Standard Chartered Sees The Entire Market By 2030 

The bank laid out a step-by-step path to its 2030 target. It expects the cryptocurrency to reach $180 by the end of this year, then climb to $600, $1,200, and $2,200 over the following three years before hitting $3,500 at the end of the decade.

Kendrick also flagged two additional catalysts that could accelerate that trajectory. The first is the potential relaunch of Aave’s buyback program, which would see the protocol use its own revenue to purchase tokens from the open market — typically a bullish signal for any asset. 

The second is Horizon, Aave’s initiative designed to bring real-world asset lending into a regulated framework, which could open the protocol to a new class of institutional participants.

Standard Chartered’s AAVE projection sits alongside equally ambitious targets for the broader market. The same report set a price target of $40,000 for Ethereum and $500,000 for Bitcoin by the end of 2030.

Featured image generated with OpenArt.