Original Author: Jae, PANews

A report from a traditional bank has ignited the slightly dormant DeFi track.

Geoff Kendrick, the head of global digital asset research at Standard Chartered Bank, released a first coverage report on the decentralized exchange (DEX) Uniswap on June 15, offering a radical prediction that caught the attention of the crypto market: the governance token UNI is expected to soar nearly 40 times, reaching the integer milestone of 100 dollars before the end of 2030.

At that time, the trading price of UNI was only about 2.6 dollars.

Once mocked as “air governance tokens,” UNI is being repriced by Wall Street as a productive asset with network effects. While the 40-fold long-term narrative is enticing, the journey to the finish line may not be a smooth path.

The Wall Street Script for a 40-Fold Growth of UNI: Four Numbers, One Main Line

In Standard Chartered Bank's deconstruction logic, Uniswap is being embedded into a valuation framework that deeply integrates traditional finance with the on-chain world.

RWA Tokenization Index Expansion (340 Billion → 4 Trillion)

The starting point of growth is the wave of RWA (real-world assets) going on-chain. Standard Chartered Bank predicts that the global scale of tokenized assets on-chain will experience exponential growth, skyrocketing from the current approximately 340 billion dollars to 4 trillion dollars by the end of 2028. Major asset management giants like Fidelity and BlackRock are moving traditional assets such as stocks, government bonds, and money market funds onto the blockchain in bulk, with on-chain tokenized asset liquidity expected to expand at a rate far exceeding industry expectations.

This is akin to building a larger reservoir for the DeFi track: first piling up asset scales, and then subsequent financial activities like trading, lending, and staking will have enough targets to accommodate.

DeFi Penetration Rate (3.5% → 30%) Boosting TVL (37 Times)

Tokenized assets going on-chain is just the first step; stagnant water must become flowing water. Simply put, only when assets circulate into DeFi protocols can they be converted into income and value for the protocols. Standard Chartered Bank estimates that currently only about 3.5% of tokenized assets are invested in the DeFi ecosystem, and this ratio is expected to rise to 30% by 2030.

With the dual drive of native crypto asset growth and RWA entering the chain, the overall DeFi TVL (total locked value) is expected to surge 37 times from current levels, reaching approximately 2.7 trillion dollars by 2030.

Fee Switch Provides Price Support (40 times)

As the on-chain liquidity headquarters, Uniswap will become the biggest beneficiary of this capital influx, with its token UNI price rising from 2.6 dollars to 100 dollars, achieving a nearly 40-fold increase.

Standard Chartered Bank's long-term price path for UNI is: 6.5 dollars by the end of 2026 → 20 dollars by the end of 2027 → 40 dollars by the end of 2028 → 65 dollars by the end of 2029 → 100 dollars by the end of 2030.

In the past, UNI was humorously referred to as “air coins” for having only governance rights without cash flow capture ability. At the end of last year, Uniswap activated the fee switch, officially entering the deflationary era.

The report points out that Uniswap burned 100 million UNI on December 28 last year and an additional 5 million UNI, reducing the total supply from 1 billion to 895 million, with the circulating supply also dropping to 622 million. This contraction in supply will provide support for UNI's price.

Moreover, Uniswap also generated about 21 million dollars in protocol fees. The linear relationship between fees and trading volume means that as tokenized assets flow into the protocol, the fee switch will automatically trigger more burn amounts. This indicates that UNI is transforming from a “pure governance tool” to a “productive asset with deflationary attributes,” directly narrowing the valuation multiple gap between Uniswap and listed exchanges like Coinbase.

It is worth mentioning that Geoffrey Kendrick also provided a vivid business analogy in the report: comparing Uniswap to YouTube, and Coinbase to Netflix.

• Coinbase (Netflix Model): Centralized operation, heavy asset investment, requiring high capital support, listing and compliance need to go through layers of screening, high marginal costs for expansion, and limited coverage of asset types;
• Uniswap (YouTube Model): Open liquidity pool structure where any user can be a “content creator” (liquidity provider). The platform does not incur high costs for listing assets. In scenarios such as stablecoin trading, liquidity staking derivatives, and niche tokens, this open model’s network effects and long-tail advantages are hard to match by centralized exchanges (CEX).

This growing prosperity through bilateral effects is precisely the moat that enables Uniswap to maintain its leading position in the long term.

More importantly, Standard Chartered Bank believes that Uniswap is not merely a simple “retail DEX application,” but fundamentally a set of integrated market infrastructure. Once the scale of RWA expands, traditional financial institutions can directly “insert” assets into Uniswap's liquidity pool for trading. This function cannot be achieved by the traditional financial market itself.

Uniswap Becomes the Preferred Gateway for Traditional Funds, Yet Faces Assault from Emerging DEXs and Aggregators

While the long-term filter from Wall Street is captivating, returning to the realities of the crypto market, Uniswap's actual situation is not as smoothly linear as portrayed in the report.

Since its establishment in 2018, Uniswap has accumulated over 3.7 trillion dollars in trading volume, with total fees reaching 5.6 billion dollars, and a TVL of approximately 2.88 billion dollars.

From a market share perspective, Uniswap's DEX throne remains solid. Whether on the Ethereum mainnet or in various L2 ecosystems, Uniswap maintains dominance in trading volume and liquidity depth, with no competitors forming a substantive threat.

More important signals come from the institutional side. In February this year, BlackRock's tokenized money market fund BUIDL announced it was live on UniswapX for trading and strategically purchased UNI tokens. With the popularization of UniswapX, which introduces off-chain routing, gasless trading, and anti-MEV (miner extractable value) features, it significantly narrows the experience gap between DEX and CEX, becoming the preferred entry point for traditional funds to go on-chain.

Coincidentally, last Friday (June 12), Fidelity also deployed the liquidity of its stablecoin FIDD onto Uniswap. The protocol's concentrated liquidity model is currently the most efficient pricing mechanism on-chain. Once compliant RWA assets go on-chain in large scale, Uniswap is expected to become the on-chain “New York Stock Exchange,” holding pricing power over assets.

The waters of Wall Street are flowing onto the chain. And Uniswap is the faucet. Wall Street institutions are positioning Uniswap as the on-chain interface for compliant assets, and UNI is gravitating towards the pricing logic of “on-chain routing infrastructure.”

Although the prospect of reaching 100 dollars is quite tempting, there are still two major mountains ahead on Uniswap's journey to the peak, which may significantly delay or even nullify this long-term check.

• Emerging DEXs and Aggregators' Traffic Hijacking (Competitive Risk): Solana faction DEXs like Jupiter and Raydium are devouring massive retail traffic with meme frenzy and extremely low trading costs. Meanwhile, aggregators like 1inch and CowSwap are preemptively capturing users, causing Uniswap to become a “back-end liquidity pool” in certain ecosystems, continuously weakening brand premium and user mindset.
• Delay in Tokenization Implementation (Macro Risk): Standard Chartered Bank's valuation highly depends on the assumption that “DeFi TVL will reach 2.7 trillion dollars by 2030.” If the pace of global legislation on tokenization falls short of expectations, or if large-scale security incidents or systemic risks occur, the penetration speed of RWA will significantly slow down, potentially delaying the realization period of this grand narrative.

Returning to the most intuitive price aspect, UNI's current trading price is less than 3 dollars, down over 92% from the historical peak in May 2021.

The fee switch has brought deflation but has not led to a price reversal. The market's indifference to the DeFi narrative, the exhaustion of liquidity, and high macro interest rates have all put significant pressure on UNI's valuation.

However, this may be the source of Standard Chartered Bank's “40 times space”: starting from a low base.

Standard Chartered Bank's first coverage of UNI with a target price of 100 dollars carries more symbolic significance than the price itself. In reality, whether the prediction is accurate is not crucial; what is important is that Wall Street's understanding of DeFi is undergoing a transformation: from earlier views of “barbaric growth, speculative bubbles” to rational commercial judgments on “capital efficiency, network effects, cash flow value.”

It should be noted that Wall Street's reports often focus more on macro logic but fall short on micro risks. For investors involved, the allure of a 40 times destination is undeniable, but the road to 2030 is inevitably paved with thorns.

Whether UNI can truly capture the 4 trillion dollar tokenization dividend depends on how it performs this challenging duet between decentralized principles and global regulatory compliance in the real world.

Compared to a 40-fold increase, waiting for four years is a greater test of faith.

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