In a research note released Wednesday, Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, initiated coverage of Aave's token (AAVE) with a price target of $3,500 by the end of 2030—up from roughly $70 when the report was released Wednesday morning.
The bank expects the token to climb in stages, reaching $180 by the end of this year before accelerating to $600, $1,200 and $2,200 over the following three years before hitting the aforementioned projection.
AAVE hit an all-time high price above $661 back in 2021, but hasn’t come close to that mark since, despite rallying to nearly $400 in late 2024 following President Donald Trump’s reelection.
Deposits on the platform have roughly halved since, falling from $44 billion to $23 billion, while active loans have similarly fallen from $18 million to $9.5 billion in the same span. Aave's share of the broader lending market has slipped to 38% of deposits, Standard Chartered said, down from an average of 59% in the year before the incident.
Standard Chartered argues that the damage has largely run its course, pointing to a new risk framework proposed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and a recent uptick in deposits from a June low. The bank's bigger bet is on the broader trajectory of decentralized finance: It forecasts that the value of tokenized assets deployed in DeFi will grow 37-fold, to $2.7 trillion, by 2030, fueled by the expansion of stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets from TradFi giants, and rising crypto prices.
Because Aave collects fees primarily through the spread between what it pays depositors and charges borrowers, the bank argues its revenue—and by extension its token price—should track that growth closely.
Still, the forecast carries substantial uncertainty. Standard Chartered itself cautions that scaling Aave's institutional lending arm, known as Aave Horizon, is "achievable but not yet proven," and hinges on partnerships with traditional finance firms that have yet to materialize at scale.
