The Breakdown - The History of Standard Chartered Megabullish Price Predictions

Episode Date: June 17, 2026

Standard Chartered just put a $100 price target on Uniswap by 2030 — a 40× move from current levels. David walks through the call, the tokenization thesis underpinning it, and how Standard Chartered's past calls on Bitcoin, ETH, XRP, BNB and AVAX have actually played out. FOLLOW THE SHOW › David — https://x.com/dcanellis › The Breakdown — https://x.com/TheBreakdownBW › The Breakdown Newsletter — https://blockworks.com/newsletter/the-breakdown Get top market insights and the latest in crypto news. Subscribe to the Blockworks Daily Newsletter: https://blockworks.co/newsletter/ DISCLAIMER As always, remember this podcast is for informational purposes only, and any views expressed by anyone on the show are solely their opinions, not financial advice.

Welcome back to The Breakdown, everybody. I'm your host, David Canales, as always. So, in a world full of crypto bears, all the salty people on the sidelines, watching semiconductor stocks rip, watching memory stocks rip, watching the SpaceX IPO go bananas. We, of course, have standard charted, 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 charted calls for Bitcoin, Ether, Avalanche and so on to see exactly how well it has done in his calls to date.

So enough jibba jabber. Let's jump into it. This is the breakdown. Nothing said on the breakdown is a recommendation to buy yourself securities or tokens. This podcast is for informational purposes only and any views expressed by anyone in the show are opinions, not financial advice. Host 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. In Standard Chartered, they've been covering crypto for the past couple of years. And I mean, it's as tradfai as you could get, I suppose, in terms of investment banks and so on covering cryptocurrency. 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 would know they are incredibly bullish and really bombastic in their price targets as we're going. going to get into. This time around, and they've initiated coverage of Uniswap for the first time now, and their thesis ties as 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 Tradfai 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 $270 that it was when this, 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. Kenjured, Jeff Kendrit, who is the global head of digital assets research,

he says that Uniswap is going to outperform both Ether and B.AWR. 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 math is correct, and that a rising share of that base will route through D5 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 a two-fold, there's two conditions that need to be met.

There is that standard charter 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 to roughly $4 trillion over the same window, which is that figure that we just mentioned. The second leg is defy 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 defy 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 to primary beneficiaries. And so why uniswap? And essentially it boils down to the Lindy effect, that uniswap has been around forever in terms of defy. And so it 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 the, of tokenized

money markets. So to just hear some context, Tendrick 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 U.S. equities. So right now, U.S. 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 screen. This is from Coin Gecko.

We currently have about $11.23 billion worth of tokenized treasury coins, which is effectively the tokenized money markets. Right now, Circles USYC is the biggest with $3 billion, followed by BlackRock's Biddle, which is about $2.4 billion. So to go from $11.23 billion to around $2 trillion over the next two years, that is really a massive explosion in growth. in the tokenized on-chain real world asset sector. So that's particularly lofty, I will say, that call. But let's just say stranger things have happened within cryptocurrency, or at least as strange, I would say. But let's bring up the Uniswap price chart.

And this is from the Blockworth Research Portal. Yeah, so we could see that the all-time high for Uniswap was actually about $40. And this was way back in April 2021. And since then, we have never really returned to anything more than around $15. So right now we're sitting about three and a half dollars, three point three. So three and a third US dollars for Uniswap. This is up about 20, 25%, 30% since StandardChart had made the call and the market kind of realized that, hey, maybe Standard Chata might be directionally correct. But for Uniswap to hit $100, I mean, it has to go all the way up here. It has to effectively

double its all-time high set in 2021. So, I mean, I figured why not take a look at the history of standard charted calls just to see how accurate the firm has been over the past few years. And what I found is that essentially standard charted has been directionally correct, but not often has its calls actually come to fruition, you know, with extreme accuracy, I would say. Okay, so let's start with Bitcoin. So the black line on my screen, and I understand that many of you listen to this audio only.

So again, bear with you, I'm going to do my best to convey what I'm seeing on screen. But we have a chart here that plots the price of Bitcoin against standard charted price targets for Bitcoin over the past three, four years. And we see that the first call, it actually came in July 2023 when it said that Bitcoin would hit 50K by the end of 2023. And we can see that it didn't hit 50K by the end of 2023, but it did reach 50K shortly after. So this is just one of those things where this is going to come up again and again that standard charter is directly correct but not entirely accurate to the day or to the dollar basically. But since then, its calls have gotten progressively more, progressively more optimistic is a good way of saying that. So in April, in April 2023, when Bitcoin was only $28,000,

it had made the claim or it had made the projection that Bitcoin would reach $6,000. features 100k by the end of 2024. And it was only just short. It was a near miss for that particular call. It touched $103,000 by December 5, but it closed at 93,400. So it wasn't, it didn't hold on to the price target, the standard charter that said. But again, standard charter was directionally correct. And I mean, the near misses are in orange here and the missed targets are in red. So I'm I mean, as biggest call to date was that Bitcoin would reach $250,000. At some point in the cycle in 2025, it projected that that would be its peak. But of course, Bitcoin fell short at about $126,000, which is actually 50% short, standard chartered's call there.

But still, it's directionally correct. So it might have overblown its target by 50%. But still, it was on its way there in the interim, I suppose you could say. And I have these on my street, and it projected that Bitcoin will reach 200K by the end of 2020s, or at the start of 2020s. But of course, that was when Bitcoin had started its retracement. So this will give you some idea as to the accuracy of standard charted, I guess, from a dollar amount. But there's no arguing that the trend standard charted seems to be picking up on something legitimate. And in the blue here, we actually have Standard Charter's current open targets for Bitcoin.

And it does this on a rolling basis. So by the end of next year, Bitcoin is projected through Standard Charter to reach 100K again. By 2028, it should be $225,000. By 2029, it would be 300K. And 2030 would be 400K. And its ultimate price target eventually is that Bitcoin will reach half a million dollars. So super bullish there from Standard Charter. But as you can see, I mean, it's more like throwing darts on a dartboard in that it rarely

hits the bullseye. But it's not to say that it isn't close at times. I mean, it was very close on its 135K call, as you can see here, very close on its 100K call as well. But it's a little bit hiddly-piddlety in terms of, I would say that the higher the price target, the less accurate standard charted has been, I suppose, is a nice way of wrapping that up. Let's now take a look at Ethereum. We're going to have a brief look at Ethereum as well. And I mean, Bitcoin has been the one that has given the most calls to.

But as we get, as we move down the list of old coins, standard chart does seem to get less accurate over time. As we can see here, that it had projected that ether would reach $8,000 by 2025. And that was obviously a very big miss with ether only reaching about 4.5K, 4.6K earlier in 2024. It had also projected that ether would hit $14,000 at the cycle peak for last year. It did not reach anywhere near that. But as you can see, it is still directionally correct. When Standard Chartered makes a $14,000 call, the price of Ether does go up. It's not like the price of Ether goes down when Standard Charter makes these calls. So, The most accurate that Standard Charter has been for Ether is actually this call of $4,000.

And this was a target that had been constantly revised. Initially in March 24, Standard Charter had made the 14K call. And that was tied to Bitcoin reaching 200K. So if Bitcoin would reach 200K, then Ether should be worth $14,000 was the projection. My understanding is that it revised that 14K call down to 10K. But again, Ether fell short of that. even 70% short of that call. And then that call was revised again down to $4,000.

And it basically did that. The call was that ether would be worth $4,000 by the end of 2025. It had broke past that a few months early to reach, it's actually a top of $4,950. But it quickly gave that up and it was revised. So standard charter call was actually, it was 26% short of standard charters projected. projection, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't directionally correct again. So from here,

we are looking at the price of ether being $4,000 by 2027, so in about a year and a half. And then we're up to 15K by 28, 22K by 2029. And 2030, it would be, one ether would be worth $30,000, which again is incredibly optimistic, I must say. But in terms of, Standard Charter's strike record for the general arc, again, it does fill me with a little bit of optimism that we at least would be going higher from here, going by its track record. And so now I have up on my screen the XRP chart, Standard Charter covers XRP. It had called in April 2025. So about this time last year that XRP would reach $5.50 by the end of 2026. and right now it's currently 67% short of that mark.

But the ultimate call is that ex-LP would reach 28 beyond 2030. By 2028 it should be $7, which again is a huge increase from here. I mean, let's take a look at B&B. B&B, it has so far been quite accurate, but it has made limited calls about B&B. Let's take a look. In May 2025, it had said that B&B's price, target of 1275 should be reached by the end of 2026.

And so this is like how far BNB would reach during the last ball market. It peaked 1355 in October, but closed the year at 863. So again, it had reached this interim price target a little bit early, but then it didn't hold on to that valuation and actually closed, B&B closed the year, 32% short. So about a third below what Standard Charter's price target would be. And of course, it dropped even further from there. But Standard Charter believes that by the end of next year, it should be back up to about $1,000 for B&B and then double that again by 2028.

And then by 29, close to 3,000 or 2,775. So Standard Charter also quite bullish on B&B. I mean, I don't think the Standard Charter is bearish about anything that it covers, it seems, and it really likes to have these huge price targets, which of course is very attention-grabbing for those people that are scrolling headlines looking for good news. Standard-charted seems to have cornered the market on bullish trad-fi predictions for coins. And I mean, the last one that we're going to look at is Avalanche. Avalanche Avalanche Avax.

It made the claim that Avax would be in April 2025. So, again, these are calls made at the very start or in the... early third of the crypto ball market for 2025. It said that Avax would reach $55 by the end of $2026. It closed at $12.30, which is about 80% short of standard charters. It is about 80% short of the price projection coming out of standard charted. So if there was something to read into all of this, I would say that standard charted is quite accurate. for Bitcoin. But as it branches out into old coins, it becomes a little bit wishy-washy in terms of of its accuracy. Not just on, I mean, directly again, it seems to be somewhere in the correct

region, but its past history has been quite below what the price projections have been. So what does that mean for Uniswap? I would say that it's good news for Uniswop holders that you do have someone like standard charted laying out the ball case for uniswopping amongst the tokenization because all we have seen so far is is massive ballposting for hyperliquid and i suppose it's for good reason but it's nice to see uniswap getting some love and and and i know that there's been a long history with the with the fee switch and holders have been quite frustrated in the direction that uniswap has drawn in in terms of value accrual for the asset but in least in terms of standard chartered the bull poster in chief for TradFi, they're looking at Uniswop and saying, well,

it should be able to ride the wave of tokenization and real world assets coming on chain. But I would also be quite cautious about the reality of whether Uniswap might hit $100. I mean, anything is possible. We all know that. But let's just say that Standard Charter is picking up on a price trend. And they are given the ultimate best case scenario for that price trend. and that is three figures for Uniswap. But in any case, this about covers it for today.

It's just a quick one. It's very fascinating to see a shop like Standard Charter be relentlessly bullish for so long in its price calls. I mean, I think the only other individual that comes close, I suppose, is Tom Lee. Tom Lee. I mean, both Standard Charter and Tom Lee have apparently gone to the same school of bullishness when it comes to cryptocurrency.

And before that, I would have to say, the only other person that is so mega bullish on cryptocurrency would have to be someone like John McCaffey, rest in peace. So I'm glad to see Standard Chartered holding the courts, carrying the torch for McCaffey and the like. And it's cool to see that it's not just Tom Lee that is a permable on crypto. Standard Charter is also right up alongside him.

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