Standard Chartered: Uniswap’s UNI could rise 40x to $100 by 2030

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Uniswap and projects the protocol's UNI token could reach $100 by the end of 2030, roughly 40 times the current price near $2.70. The bank ties the forecast to expected growth in tokenized assets and decentralized finance activity.

The bank's digital assets research team, led by Geoffrey Kendrick, projects tokenized assets onchain to rise from about $340 billion today to $4 trillion by the end of 2028. Kendrick expects the share of tokenized assets used in DeFi to increase from roughly 3.5% now to about 30% by the end of 2030. Combined with growth in crypto-native assets, Standard Chartered estimates assets locked in DeFi could reach about $2.7 trillion, roughly 37 times current levels. The report says those changes would expand liquidity available in Uniswap pools and enlarge the market for token swaps.

Standard Chartered set a phased price path for UNI: $6.50 by end-2026, $20 by end-2027, $40 by end-2028, $65 by end-2029 and $100 by end-2030. The bank projects UNI would outperform ether and bitcoin over the same period if its adoption assumptions hold.

Geoffrey Kendrick compared Uniswap’s model to a user-driven platform and contrasted it with centralized exchanges that curate listings. “Uniswap is like YouTube, while Coinbase is like Netflix,” he wrote, saying the model lowers capital requirements for the protocol because liquidity is supplied by users. The report adds this structure fits trading of closely related assets, such as stablecoins or staked ether derivatives, and supports listing smaller or niche tokens that centralized exchanges might not list.

The report noted a December 2025 upgrade called UNIfication activated protocol fees and programmatic UNI burns. Since the fee switch, Uniswap has generated about $21 million in protocol fees and burned roughly 5 million UNI tokens, an annualized burn near 1%. A prior one-time burn of 100 million UNI reduced total supply from 1 billion to about 895 million, with circulating supply at roughly 622 million.

Standard Chartered identified risks that could affect UNI's outlook. These include competition from smaller decentralized exchanges that offer specialized products, the challenge of commercializing tokenized real-world assets and forming deeper partnerships with traditional financial firms, the impact of regulatory developments in the United States, and the fact that Uniswap V4's hook system has not been tested at the scale the bank projects by 2030.

The report frames its UNI price path as dependent on the scale and timing of tokenized asset adoption and expanded DeFi usage, and it presents benchmarks tied to those scenarios.