In brief
- Standard Chartered forecasts AAVE will rise ~50x from ~$70 earlier Wednesday to $3,500 by the end of 2030.
- The bank believes Aave has moved past an April liquidity crunch that halved deposits, and expects the token to track a projected 37x growth in DeFi assets by 2030.
- The bullish case depends on unproven steps, such as Aave Horizon through new partnerships with traditional finance firms.
Analysts at Standard Chartered are betting big on Aave, one of the largest lending platforms in decentralized finance (DeFi), projecting that its native token could surge nearly 50 times from current levels by the end of the decade—a forecast that arrives just months after the protocol was rattled by a major ecosystem exploit.
In a research note released Wednesday, Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, initiated coverage of Aave’s token (AAVE) with a price target of $3,500 by the end of 2030—up from roughly $70 when the report was released Wednesday morning.
The bank expects the token to climb in stages, reaching $180 by the end of this year before accelerating to $600, $1,200 and $2,200 over the following three years before hitting the aforementioned projection.
AAVE hit an all-time high price above $661 back in 2021, but hasn’t come close to that mark since, despite rallying to nearly $400 in late 2024 following President Donald Trump’s reelection.
The optimism follows a rough stretch for Aave, which automates lending and borrowing without human middlemen. An April theft of $291 million from a smaller DeFi platform, KelpDAO, spilled over into Aave, impacting liquidity while spooking many DeFi users into withdrawing their assets altogether.
Deposits on the platform have roughly halved since, falling from $44 billion to $23 billion, while active loans have similarly fallen from $18 million to $9.5 billion in the same span. Aave’s share of the broader lending market has slipped to 38% of deposits, Standard Chartered said, down from an average of 59% in the year before the incident.
Standard Chartered argues that the damage has largely run its course, pointing to a new risk framework proposed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and a recent uptick in deposits from a June low. The bank’s bigger bet is on the broader trajectory of decentralized finance: It forecasts that the value of tokenized assets deployed in DeFi will grow 37-fold, to $2.7 trillion, by 2030, fueled by the expansion of stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets from TradFi giants, and rising crypto prices.
Because Aave collects fees primarily through the spread between what it pays depositors and charges borrowers, the bank argues its revenue—and by extension its token price—should track that growth closely.
Still, the forecast carries substantial uncertainty. Standard Chartered itself cautions that scaling Aave’s institutional lending arm, known as Aave Horizon, is “achievable but not yet proven,” and hinges on partnerships with traditional finance firms that have yet to materialize at scale.
Digital asset prices also remain notoriously volatile, with Bitcoin falling to a 21-month low on Wednesday and most other major assets dipping alongside. AAVE rose above $77 earlier in the day, following the report’s release, but then gave up most of the gains as the market sputtered—but it has since topped $79, up nearly 9% on the day as Bitcoin starts to recover.
Alongside its projection of AAVE hitting $3,500 by the end of 2030, Standard Chartered’s report stated price targets of $40,000 for Ethereum (up from $1,614 as of this writing) and $500,000 for Bitcoin (currently $60,831).
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