AAVE Jumps After Standard Chartered Starts Coverage, Sees Token Reaching $3,500 By 2030

The target implies a gain of roughly 50 times from Aave's current price of about $74.

• Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Aave, forecasting its native token could climb by 4500%  by the end of 2030.
• The report was authored by Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, as part of Standard Chartered's expanding focus on decentralized finance.
• AAVE rose more than 4% over the past 24 hours after the coverage initiation.

Aave's native token AAVE edged higher on Tuesday after Standard Chartered initiated coverage of the decentralized lending protocol with one of the most bullish forecasts yet from a major bank, projecting the token could climb to $3,500 by the end of 2030. From the current price of AAVE at $76, the investment bank sees an upside of 4500%.

The outlook comes from Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, and marks the latest in a series of bullish decentralized finance reports published by Standard Chartered this year. 

According to the report, Aave is well-positioned to benefit from the continued growth of decentralized finance as lending activity increasingly moves on-chain. The protocol allows users to borrow and lend digital assets without traditional financial intermediaries and has become one of the largest decentralized finance platforms by total value locked.

AAVE’s price was up over 5% over the past 24 hours following the coverage initiation. On Stocktwits, the retail sentiment around AAVE remained in the ‘bullish’ zone, while chatter around it stayed in the ‘high’ levels over the past day. 

A Growing Institutional Focus On DeFi

The coverage reflects Standard Chartered's expanding focus beyond Bitcoin (BTC)  and Ethereum (ETH) into broader crypto sectors. The bank has increasingly published research on decentralized finance (DeFi), tokenization, and digital asset infrastructure as institutional adoption of blockchain-based financial services accelerates.

Kendrick argued that Aave's established market position, revenue generation, and role within the decentralized finance ecosystem could support substantial long-term appreciation in the protocol's native token. 

This means Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) in an AAVE investment would be 134% per year. 

Part Of A Broader Crypto Thesis

The report extends a series of high-profile crypto forecasts from Standard Chartered, which has previously published bullish outlooks for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other digital asset sectors.

While the bank's $3,500 target represents a long-term projection rather than a near-term forecast, it underscores growing institutional confidence that decentralized finance platforms could capture a larger share of global financial activity over the coming years.

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