Kendrick’s projection is rooted in Uniswap’s structural neutrality, enabling Wall Street firms to build on its platform with confidence that underlying rules won’t change as tokenized assets scale. Along those lines, he compared Uniswap to YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix.
“For TradFi institutions, Uniswap should be viewed less as a retail DEX app and more as market infrastructure that TradFi can integrate with once tokenized assets scale and TradFi operators want to plug them into DeFi,” Kendrick explained.
By the end of the decade, Standard Chartered expects the value of digital assets deposited or staked in DeFi protocols to reach $2.7 trillion. As a result, liquidity pools on Uniswap could have 37x more assets to trade on-chain by then, Kendrick noted.
There’s a linear relationship between Uniswap’s protocol fees and trading volumes, meaning that as tokenized assets proliferate on-chain, the platform’s “UNIfication” upgrade in late 2025 will programmatically trigger more token burns, he added.
Kendrick noted that UNI’s total supply has fallen to roughly 895 million from 1 trillion since the protocol's fee activation in December—a supply squeeze bolstered by a massive retroactive burn alongside an ongoing annualized burn rate of roughly 1%.
Despite anchoring the DeFi space for years, Kendrick argued that Uniswap faces risks from smaller players that can create more competitive solutions for specific use cases. On top of that, he wrote that headwinds could arise from the creation of compliance rules around tokenization.
At the time, the world’s largest asset manager planned to purchase UNI tokens, a person familiar with the matter told Decrypt. Kendrick, meanwhile, projected on Monday that the digital asset’s price will reach $6.50 by the end of the year.
