Overview
- Standard Chartered initiated formal coverage on Wednesday and set a long‑term price target of $3,500 for AAVE by the end of 2030, based on a forecast that tokenized assets used in DeFi could grow about 37‑fold by 2030.
- The bank cited newly consolidated protocol figures showing roughly $907 million in revenue for 2025 and about $333 million year‑to‑date in 2026 after Aave’s governance routed product revenues into the DAO under the “Aave Will Win” proposal.
- Standard Chartered said Aave has largely moved past the April KelpDAO bridge spillover, noting the protocol’s core smart contracts were not breached even though the exploit created roughly $230–$291 million in bad debt and triggered large deposit outflows.
- The research frames Aave’s Horizon permissioned market and tokenized real‑world assets as the primary growth driver, but it warns that scaling Horizon requires legal, operational partnerships and institutional integrations that are not yet proven.
- Market response was cautiously positive because bank research can lower barriers for institutional allocators, yet the upside depends on deposit recovery, successful institutional adoption, governance decisions, and ongoing management of composability and regulatory risks.