Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick initiated coverage of Aave's native token AAVE on Tuesday with a $3,500 price target by the end of 2030, a call that implies a roughly 50-fold gain from current levels and would see the token outperform both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the same period.
Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, framed Aave as an automated, blockchain-based bank without employees or discretionary decision-making. At its October 2025 peak, Aave held roughly $75 billion in deposits, a figure Kendrick said would have placed the protocol among the 30 largest banks in the United States.
LATEST: š Standard Chartered says AAVE could hit $3,500 by 2030, arguing it has regained assets lost during April's Kelp DAO exploit and is primed for a DeFi revival. pic.twitter.com/GipDeXhtId
ā CoinMarketCap (@CoinMarketCap) June 25, 2026
AAVE's all-time high stands at roughly $662 from May 2021, a level the $3,500 target more than quintuple exceeds. The bank mapped a staged path, with AAVE at $180 by the end of 2026, then $600, $1,200, and $2,200 in the following years before a reach to $3,500 by the close of the decade. Aave is the third DeFi protocol in a formal coverage series Standard Chartered has built through the past year. The bank previously initiated Uniswap with a $100 end-2030 target in June, per The HODLFM, and published an April note that argued DeFi was "bent, not broken" in the aftermath of the KelpDAO exploit.
How the KelpDAO exploit cut Aave's market share
The April 18 exploit of KelpDAO is the backstory Kendrick's initiation had to address before the bullish case could land. Attackers drained roughly $292 million in rsETH from a LayerZero-powered bridge and deposited the stolen tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow real assets. The incident left the protocol exposed to potential losses of up to $230 million and triggered a wave of depositor exits.
According to the Standard Chartered note, Aave deposits fell from $44 billion to $23 billion after the exploit. Active loans dropped from $18 billion to $9.5 billion. Aave's market share in the broader lending market declined to 38% of deposits and 42% of active loans, compared to averages of 59% and 64%, respectively, in the 12 months before the theft.
"We think Aave has moved past the April cybertheft incident as assets start to return to the platform," Kendrick said.
Standard Chartered views the current figures as a trough. In early June, Aave founder Stani Kulechov announced the protocol was developing a new risk framework, still pending governance review. Kulechov separately pointed to deposit activity as a sign of return.
"USDT deposits are flowing back to Aave," Kulechov noted.
USDT deposits on Aave's Ethereum core market have approached $3 billion. Aave V4, launched in March, crossed $200 million in deposits within three months, according to Grayscale, though 99.4% of total deposits remained on V3 as of the note's publication.
The AAVE token buyback program, launched by the Aave DAO in April 2025, was paused the day after the KelpDAO exploit on April 19. Before the pause, the program repurchased 205,000 AAVE tokens, roughly 1.3% of total supply. Standard Chartered named the buyback restart as one of two catalysts required for the thesis to materialize, with deeper ties to traditional finance as the other.
The real-world asset thesis behind the price target
Kendrick's central forecast holds that the value of tokenized assets deployed in DeFi will reach $2.7 trillion by end-2030, a 37-fold increase from current levels. Stablecoin supply is projected to hit $2 trillion by end-2028, up from roughly $310 billion today. Because roughly 90% of Aave's fees over the past 12 months derived from net interest margin, the bank argues fee income and token price should track deposit growth directly.
Aave Horizon, the protocol's permissioned lending market for tokenized real-world assets launched in August 2025, is the growth driver Kendrick placed at the center of the longer-term case. Asset managers VanEck and WisdomTree backed the market early. The newest entrant is mGLOBAL, a Midas token that tracks a Fasanara Capital private credit strategy from the London-based manager's $6 billion book. Midas reported $17.1 million was supplied against the token on its first day.
Kulechov framed Horizon's expansion directly.
"mGLOBAL is another step to expand Aave to tap into receivables finance market. RWAs are the biggest opportunity for Aave," he said.
Horizon held $163 million in active loans as of end of May, against a tokenized RWA market cap Standard Chartered estimates at roughly $30 billion. Kendrick acknowledged that scaling the platform to traditional finance institutions would require institution-specific compliance negotiations, and that clearer U.S. regulatory frameworks, including potential passage of the Clarity Act, could accelerate adoption. The U.S. repo market carries about $12.6 trillion in daily exposures per federal research, and V4's hub-and-spoke architecture is built to channel a share of that market on-chain without bridge reliance.
GHO and what the note flags as uncertain
"We forecast significant upside for digital asset token prices into year-end, and we think Aave has moved beyond the April incident. Longer-term, we expect the value of tokenized assets active in DeFi to increase 37x between now and end-2030, driving more deposits to the platform," Kendrick said.
Aave's GHO stablecoin adds a separate revenue stream to the thesis. Outstanding supply has grown to roughly $600 million since the stablecoin's 2023 launch. Unlike fees from standard lending markets, all GHO-related revenue flows to the protocol without distribution to external liquidity providers.
V4's hub-and-spoke design also directly targets the bridge vulnerability exploited in April. The Ethereum Economic Zone, which enables liquidity sharing across layer-2 protocols without bridge dependence, is expected to go live on mainnet this summer.
Standard Chartered published separate 2030 targets alongside the Aave initiation: $500,000 for Bitcoin and $40,000 for Ethereum. Kendrick's note described scaling Horizon to TradFi players as "achievable but not yet proven," and the bank stated that neither the buyback restart nor the depth of institutional partnerships was confirmed at the time of publication.
Matvii Diadkov
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