Standard Chartered Sees Aave Reaching $3,500 by 2030

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Aave with a bullish long-term forecast, saying the decentralized lending protocol’s token could reach $3,500 by the end of 2030. The call came from Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s head of digital assets research, who argued that Aave is positioned to benefit from renewed activity in DeFi and tokenized real-world assets.

The forecast matters because Aave is one of the most prominent lending protocols in decentralized finance, and its performance is closely tied to deposits and borrowing activity onchain. Kendrick’s target implies a roughly 50-fold gain from levels near $70 cited in the report, with the bank expecting AAVE to outperform bitcoin and ether over the same period.

Aave had been under pressure after an April incident involving KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge. According to the report, attackers used about $290 million of stolen tokens as collateral on Aave to borrow real assets, leaving the protocol facing potential losses of up to $230 million and prompting depositors to pull funds.

Kendrick said Aave appears to have moved past that disruption as assets return to the platform. He also described the protocol as an automated, blockchain-based bank, noting that at its October 2025 peak Aave held roughly $75 billion in deposits, a level that would have placed it among the 30 largest U.S. banks by deposits.

Standard Chartered expects tokenized assets actively used in DeFi applications to grow 37-fold by the end of the decade, creating a potential tailwind for Aave’s lending business. The report also pointed to a possible restart of Aave’s token buyback program and the Horizon initiative, which is designed to support lending against tokenized real-world assets in a permissioned setting for traditional financial institutions.