Wall Street Could Boost Uniswap's Token Price Nearly 40x by 2030: Standard Chartered

By André Beganski

Uniswap’s native token is set to surge nearly fortyfold in the coming years, outperforming Bitcoin and Ethereum as Wall Street migrates on-chain, according to Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick.

As a go-to DeFi platform, the decentralized exchange is poised to benefit from an influx of digital assets that represent traditional investments, the investment bank’s global head of digital assets shared in a Monday note—while penciling in a price target of $100 by 2030.

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.

On Monday, Uniswap’s UNI token changed hands around $2.72, a 9.8% increase over the past day, according to CoinGecko. Although the decentralized exchange’s platform has long proven dominant, the price of its associated token peaked around $45 five years ago.

Since it was established in 2018, Uniswap has facilitated more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume, while netting $5.6 billion in fees, according to DeFiLlama.

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.

Still, Kendrick noted that a credible path for tokenized assets to use decentralized settlement has started to emerge. In February, BlackRock announced that its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, would be available via UniswapX—an auction-based swapping protocol—issuing the assets via tokenization platform Securitize. 

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.

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