The History of Standard Chartered Megabullish Price Predictions

**David Canellis** (0:00)
Welcome back to The Breakdown, everybody. I'm your host, David Canellis, as always. So, in a world full of crypto bears, all the salty people on the sidelines watching semiconductors stocks rip, watching memory stocks rip, watching the SpaceX IPO go bananas, we, of course, have Standard Chartered, still ultra bullish on cryptocurrency. Unreasonably bullish, some might say. The latest call is Uniswap, going about 40x from current rates over the next five or six years. We're going to be taking a look at that for this particular episode. We're also going to be looking at the history of Standard Chartered calls for Bitcoin, Ether, Avalanche and so on, to see exactly how well it has done in his calls to date. So, enough jibber jabber. Let's jump into it. This is The Breakdown.
Nothing is said on The Breakdown as a recommendation to buy or sell securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are opinions, not financial advice. Hosts and guests may hold positions in the company's funds or projects discussed. Okay, so this is news from a couple of days ago, but I think it really warrants revisiting and unpacking. I've got this right up here from The Defiant. And Standard Chartered, they've been covering crypto for the past couple of years. And I mean, it's as TradFi as you could get, I suppose, in terms of investment banks and so on, covering crypto currency. So it's always very interesting when we see a Standard Chartered call. And if you've been watching their price targets over the past few years, you will know they are incredibly bullish and really bombastic in their price targets as we're going to get into. This time around, and they've initiated coverage of Uniswap for the first time now. And their thesis ties its governance token to the institutional tokenization wave. And effectively, they're saying, well, if we're about to see a wave of tokenization of real world assets coming on chain, then Uniswap is actually going to be one of the primary venues for that big wave of of TradFi assets coming on chain. It's interesting that it's not hyperliquid, they're really framing it as a Uniswap story. They've actually given a price target of $100 for Uniswap by the end of 2030, which is a 40-fold move from the $2.70 that it was when news that the coverage had initiated first dropped.
I'm going to bring up the chart in a moment so you can see exactly what that move looks like. Jeff Kendrick, who is the global head of digital assets research, he says that Uniswap is going to outperform both Ether and Bitcoin from now until 2030 The defiant here notes that the forecast rests on a structural call that tokenized assets on chain will swell to 4 trillion by the end of 2028, which is about two and a half years away, if my maths is correct. And that a rising share of that base will route through DeFi venues for which Uniswap is the default infrastructure, notably not hyperliquid, which I find quite curious. So for Kendrick's call to really come to fruition, there's two conditions that need to be met.
There is that Standard Chartered expects the on-chain stock of tokenized real-world assets, excluding stable coins, to reach $2 trillion by the end of 2028, with tokenized money market funds and US equities leading the expansion. Adding stable coins lifts the total tokenized base roughly $4 trillion over the same window, which is that figure that we just mentioned. The second leg is DeFi capture. Kendrick estimates that about 3.5% of tokenized assets currently sit inside DeFi protocols, and projects that share will climb to 30% by 2030 On those assumptions, total value locked in DeFi would reach $2.7 trillion by the end of the decade, a 37-fold increase from current levels. The bank frames the inflow as the next wealth creation phase in digital assets, with DeFi protocols the primary beneficiaries. And so why Uniswap? And essentially, it boils down to the Lindy effect, that Uniswap has been around forever in terms of DeFi.
And so it's extrapolate that out when we have a big wave of on-chain assets and TradFi trading on-chain for real-world assets, then Uniswap should be the primary venue, is the general idea.
It's also worth giving some context about the current state of tokenized money markets. So to just give some context, Hendrick is saying that the on-chain stock of tokenized real-world assets excluding stable coins will reach $2 trillion by 2028 And that will be mostly made up of tokenized money market funds and US equities. So right now US equities, there's not a big amount of market cap for those currently. My understanding is that the tokenized money market funds are currently the bigger, the bigger portion of the RWA market, at least out of the two. And I have this up on my stream. This is from CoinGecko. They currently have about 11.23 billion dollars worth of tokenized treasury coins, which is effectively the tokenized money markets. Right now Circles USYC is the biggest with $3 billion, followed by BlackRog's Biddle, which is about $2.4 billion.