'Owning the rails': Standard Chartered sees LINK at $200 by 2030 as Chainlink underpins tokenized-asset boom

Standard Chartered sees a roughly 25-fold gain for Chainlink’s native token from about $8 today, framing the network as critical infrastructure for a successful mass tokenization of real-world assets.

Analysts at the bank initiated coverage of Chainlink on Monday with a price forecast of $200 for its LINK token by end-2030,

"It is the only end-to-end platform capable of supporting the full lifecycle of tokenized assets across both DeFi and TradFi," wrote Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research.

Details from Kendrick’s note suggest the call rests on a primary thesis: as more of the financial system moves onchain, the assets will need trusted external data, secure movement between networks, and compliance tooling.

Chainlink is currently the only provider offering all of it, Standard Chartered argues in Kendrick’s note titled "Owning the rails."

The tokenization forecast doing the heavy lifting

Standard Chartered projects that the value of tokenized assets onchain will climb to $4 trillion by end-2028, up from around $340 billion today. It also expects the share of tokenized and crypto-native assets deployed in DeFi to rise, reaching $2.7 trillion by end-2030, a 37-fold increase.

According to Kendrick, those assets are more data-hungry than crypto-native ones since funds require net asset value and share-class information, bonds require rates and payment schedules, and stablecoins require reserve attestations. Each of those needs routes back to an oracle.

Chainlink already secures much of that value, Standard Chartered asserted. Its total value secured stands above $110 billion, spanning roughly 70% of oracle-dependent value across DeFi globally and more than 80% on Ethereum, with over $32 trillion in transaction value enabled to date, according to the note.

Where the fees come from

Standard Chartered expects Chainlink's fee generation to scale about 25 times between now and end-2030, split across its oracle business, which currently dominates, and its cross-chain and interoperability lines.

Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol ranks second by volume, but the bank noted that more than $7 billion in token value migrated to CCIP after a $292 million cyberattack on a LayerZero bridge in April 2026. Quarterly CCIP volume reached $4.9 billion in the second quarter, up 353% year over year.

Assuming a linear relationship between activity, fees, and token price, that 25-fold fee expansion underpins the 25-fold LINK forecast, outpacing both ether and bitcoin over the horizon, Kendrick said.

DeFi still drives the bulk of fees, with Aave V3 alone accounting for 44% of Chainlink's total value secured. Standard Chartered expects the balance to tilt toward traditional finance as tokenization scales.

The bank also flagged the Chainlink Reserve, a fund that converts network fees into LINK. It holds around 5 million LINK worth roughly $40 million, and about two-thirds of fees are estimated to have flowed into it since it went live, according to Standard Chartered's estimate.

The institutional roster and the risks

Kendrick’s read of the tokenization sector pins Chainlink's traction with traditional finance anchors to its growth forecast.

Institutions already using its services include Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity, and S&P Global, the note said. Chainlink notably integrated Swift messaging with UBS last year to streamline tokenized fund workflows.

Despite optimism toward Chainlink’s position, Kendrick named three risks to the view.

A slower-than-expected pace of institutional tokenization, competition from specialist providers in individual product categories, and technical or configuration failures that could damage confidence in the platform, the analyst opined.

The Block's price page shows LINK traded around $8.31 on Aug. 10, near the level Standard Chartered cited as its starting point.