Analysts at Standard Chartered are placing an aggressive bet on Aave, one of the biggest lending platforms in decentralized finance (DeFi). The bank believes Aave's native token could climb nearly 50 times above its current level by the end of the decade. What makes the call striking is its timing: it lands just months after a major exploit shook the protocol.
In a research note published 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. When the report came out on Wednesday morning, the token was trading at roughly $70.
A staged climb, not a single leap
The bank expects the token to move up in steps rather than all at once. It sees AAVE reaching $180 by the end of this year, then accelerating to $600, $1,200 and $2,200 over the following three years before finally hitting the $3,500 mark.
AAVE touched its all-time high above $661 back in 2021, but it has not come close to that level since. It did rally to nearly $400 in late 2024 after Donald Trump's reelection, yet it failed to push much further.
A theft that rattled the protocol
The optimism arrives after a rough stretch for Aave, which automates lending and borrowing without any human middlemen. In April, $291 million was stolen from a smaller DeFi platform, KelpDAO, and the fallout spilled over into Aave. It dented liquidity and spooked many DeFi users into pulling out their assets entirely.
Deposits on the platform have roughly halved since then, sliding from $44 billion to $23 billion. Active loans have likewise fallen, from $18 million to $9.5 billion over the same span. Aave's share of the broader lending market has slipped to 38% of deposits, according to Standard Chartered, down from an average of 59% in the year before the incident.
Why the bank stays confident
Standard Chartered argues the damage has largely run its course. It points to a new risk framework proposed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and a recent pickup in deposits from a June low. The bank's bigger wager, though, is on the overall direction of DeFi. It forecasts that the value of tokenized assets deployed in DeFi will grow 37-fold, to $2.7 trillion, by 2030, driven by the spread of stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets from TradFi giants, and rising crypto prices.
Because Aave earns most of its money from the spread between what it pays depositors and what it charges borrowers, the bank reasons that its revenue, and with it the token price, should track that growth closely.
The risks are real too
Even so, the forecast comes with plenty of uncertainty. Standard Chartered itself warns that scaling Aave's institutional lending arm, known as Aave Horizon, is "achievable but not yet proven," and depends on partnerships with traditional finance firms that have yet to materialize at scale.
Digital asset prices are also famously volatile. On Wednesday, Bitcoin fell to a 21-month low, dragging most other major assets down with it. AAVE rose above $77 earlier that day after the report came out, but it surrendered most of those gains as the market sputtered. It has since climbed back above $79, up nearly 9% on the day as Bitcoin began to recover.
Alongside its $3,500 projection for AAVE by the end of 2030, Standard Chartered's report also set price targets of $40,000 for Ethereum (up from $1,614) and $500,000 for Bitcoin (currently $60,831).
