Overview
- Standard Chartered initiated formal coverage Monday and set a staged path for LINK that begins with $13 by end-2026 and reaches $200 by the end of 2030.
- The bank’s valuation rests on tokenized assets growing to about $4 trillion by end-2028 and DeFi-deployed assets to roughly $2.7 trillion by 2030, which it says would drive much higher demand for oracle and cross-chain services.
- Chainlink usage metrics cited in the note show rising activity for its oracle feeds and CCIP cross-chain protocol, including roughly $18 billion of CCIP throughput in Q1, about $4.9 billion in Q2, and more than $7 billion migrated from legacy bridges after an April bridge exploit.
- Standard Chartered points to institutional pilots and partners such as Swift, DTCC, Euroclear, JPMorgan, Mastercard, UBS, Fidelity and S&P Global as evidence that off-chain financial demand could add recurring fee revenue that benefits LINK holders.
- The bank warns the $200 case is conditional on several factors holding at once, including CCIP remaining competitive, pilots becoming production workflows, fee economics that flow value to LINK, and clearer regulation, any of which could weaken the forecast.