A major bank's bold crypto call is making waves. Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets at Standard Chartered, says Uniswap's own token could rise nearly fortyfold in the years ahead, and in doing so leave both Bitcoin and Ethereum behind. The logic behind the call is straightforward: as Wall Street firms shift their operations on-chain, the biggest winner will be this decentralized exchange.
A $100 target and the thinking behind it
In a note released Monday, the investment bank's global head of digital assets pinned a price target of $100 on the UNI token by 2030. According to Kendrick, Uniswap stands as a go-to DeFi platform, so when a flood of digital assets representing traditional investments arrives on-chain, this venue is positioned to capture it.
His case rests on Uniswap's structural neutrality. Kendrick argues that this neutrality is exactly what lets Wall Street firms build on the platform with confidence, knowing the underlying rules won't shift even as tokenized assets scale up. To drive the point home he offered a vivid comparison, likening Uniswap to YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix.
“For TradFi institutions, Uniswap should be viewed less as a retail DEX app and more as market infrastructure that TradFi can integrate with once tokenized assets scale and TradFi operators want to plug them into DeFi,” Kendrick explained.
Where UNI stands today
According to CoinGecko, Uniswap's UNI token was trading around $2.72 on Monday, up 9.8% over the past day. While the decentralized exchange has long proven its dominance as a platform, its associated token last hit a peak of around $45 five years ago.
Data from DeFiLlama shows that since it was set up in 2018, Uniswap has handled more than $3.7 trillion in trading volume while earning $5.6 billion in fees along the way.
The $2.7 trillion wager
Standard Chartered expects the value of digital assets deposited or staked in DeFi protocols to reach $2.7 trillion by the end of the decade. Kendrick says the direct consequence is that, by then, Uniswap's liquidity pools could have 37x more assets to trade on-chain.
He also added a key technical point. There is a linear relationship between Uniswap's protocol fees and its trading volumes, which means that as tokenized assets multiply on-chain, the platform's “UNIfication” upgrade due in late 2025 will programmatically trigger more token burns.
How a shrinking supply helps
Kendrick noted that since the protocol's fee activation in December, UNI's total supply has dropped to roughly 895 million from 1 trillion. That squeeze was driven by a massive retroactive burn, alongside an ongoing annualized burn rate of roughly 1%.
The risks that remain
Even after anchoring the DeFi space for years, Kendrick concedes Uniswap is not without risks. Smaller players could build more competitive solutions tailored to specific use cases. On top of that, he wrote that the creation of compliance rules around tokenization could throw up fresh headwinds.
How BlackRock changed the picture
Still, Kendrick believes a credible path is now emerging for tokenized assets to use decentralized settlement. In February, BlackRock announced that its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, would be available through UniswapX, an auction-based swapping protocol, with the assets issued via the tokenization platform Securitize.
A person familiar with the matter told TrendKia that, at the time, the world's largest asset manager was planning to purchase UNI tokens. Kendrick, for his part, also projected on Monday that the digital asset's price will reach $6.50 by the end of the year.
