Standard Chartered said Uniswap’s UNI token could reach $100 by 2030. It said that if tokenisation of real-world assets in traditional finance gains traction, Uniswap could establish itself as core on-chain trading infrastructure.

Cryptocurrency outlet Decrypt reported on June 15 that Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets, said in a report that UNI could post gains that outpace bitcoin and ether.

Kendrick pointed to Uniswap’s automated market maker, or AMM, structure as a strength. He said Uniswap could go beyond being a decentralised exchange for retail investors and serve as neutral market infrastructure linking traditional financial institutions so they can trade tokenised assets on-chain. “Traditional financial institutions should view Uniswap not as a simple DeFi application, but as core infrastructure for the tokenised asset market,” he said.

Standard Chartered said an expanding tokenised asset market could lead to higher trading volume on Uniswap, rising fee revenue and more token burns. It highlighted that UNI’s scarcity has strengthened since the “fee switch” was introduced at the end of last year. About 1 percent of total supply is now burned annually, it said, adding that as tokenised asset trading increases, Uniswap’s “UNIfication” upgrade is expected to drive more token burns.

Supply is also declining. UNI’s total supply has fallen to about 895 million from roughly 1 billion after fees were activated at the end of last year. It said the result reflects large-scale retrospective burns and continued supply reductions.

Standard Chartered also rated the tokenised market’s growth potential highly. The report projected that digital assets deposited or staked in DeFi protocols could reach $2.7 trillion by 2030. It said the amount of on-chain assets tradable through Uniswap liquidity pools could expand by as much as 37 times from current levels.

Uniswap has already become a key trading infrastructure in the DeFi ecosystem. DefiLlama said Uniswap has processed cumulative trading volume of more than $3.7 trillion since its 2018 launch, while cumulative fee income has exceeded $5.6 billion. UNI’s price has yet to recover its previous peak. It is trading far below its all-time high of about $45. As of the time of writing, UNI was about $2.72, up 9.8 percent over the day.

The outlook is not uniformly optimistic. Kendrick said that while Uniswap has become a leading DeFi protocol, rival protocols specialising in specific areas are emerging as a risk factor. He also warned that growth could slow if regulation and compliance standards for tokenised assets tighten.

Even so, links between traditional finance and Uniswap are already widening. BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, said in February it would support the use of its tokenised money market fund, BUIDL, via UniswapX. Securitize is handling tokenised issuance of the product. Kendrick said, “A reliable path is starting to form for tokenised assets to use decentralised settlement infrastructure.”

Standard Chartered set a short-term target alongside its long-term outlook. Kendrick said UNI could rise to about $6.50 by the end of this year. He said the key to UNI’s price outlook is not simply a DeFi recovery, but whether tokenised assets from traditional finance are actually distributed and settled on open protocols such as Uniswap.