Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Aave (AAVE) on Tuesday, forecasting the decentralized lending protocol's native token could rise 50x to $3,500 by the end of 2030 from roughly $74 today.
The initiation, authored by Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, extends a series of bullish decentralized finance calls Standard Chartered has published this year.
The Block covered the bank's April note arguing DeFi was "bent, not broken" after the KelpDAO exploit, its May projection of $4 trillion in tokenized assets by end-2028, and its June initiation of Uniswap (UNI) with a $100 end-2030 target.
Aave is the third DeFi protocol to receive formal coverage under that framework, with a price target the bank frames as a bet on DeFi's structural recovery and a coming wave of real-world assets moving onchain.
The recovery case
