A major global bank just put a $3,500 price target on AAVE, the governance token of the largest decentralized lending protocol in crypto. That would represent roughly a 50-fold increase from where the token was trading when the report dropped.
Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick initiated coverage of Aave on June 24, laying out a year-by-year roadmap that reads like a DeFi bull’s fever dream. The bank expects AAVE to hit $180 by the end of 2026, $600 by the end of 2027, $1,200 by the end of 2028, $2,200 by the end of 2029, and ultimately $3,500 by the close of 2030.
The bigger picture behind the number
AAVE’s target doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Standard Chartered’s broader 2030 forecasts include Bitcoin at $500K and Ethereum at $40K. The bank also slapped a $100 target on Uniswap’s UNI token, suggesting it sees a broad revival across the DeFi sector, not just in lending.
The thesis rests on two pillars. First, the anticipated comeback of decentralized finance as a sector. Second, the tokenization of real-world assets, a trend that has been gathering momentum with institutional players increasingly experimenting with on-chain representations of bonds, treasuries, and other traditional financial instruments.
