Aave Token Could Climb 50x by End of 2030, Standard Chartered Says—Here’s Why

Analysts at Standard Chartered are betting big on it Aafone of the largest credit platforms in the field of decentralized finance (DeFi), predicting that the native token could reach nearly fifty times its current level by the end of the decade – a prediction that comes just months after the protocol was disrupted by a major ecosystem exploit.

In a research note released Wednesday, Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital asset research, initiated coverage of Aave’s token (AAVE) with a price target of $3,500 by the end of 2030 — up from around $70 when the report was released Wednesday morning.

The bank expects the token to rise in stages, reaching $180 by the end of this year, before accelerating to $600, $1,200 and $2,200 over the next three years before reaching the aforementioned projection.

AAVE hit a record price of over $661 in 2021, but hasn’t come close to that level since, despite rising to nearly $400 in late 2024 after President Donald Trump’s re-election.

The optimism follows a difficult period for Aave, which automates lending and borrowing without human intermediaries. An April theft of $291 million from a smaller DeFi platform, KelpDAO, flowed over to Aavewhich impacts liquidity while driving many DeFi users to withdraw their assets altogether.

Deposits on the platform have since roughly halved, from $44 billion to $23 billion, while active loans have also fallen from $18 million to $9.5 billion over the same period. Aave’s share of the broader lending market fell to 38% of deposits, Standard Chartered said, compared with an average of 59% in the year before the incident.

Standard Chartered argues that the damage has largely been done, pointing to a new risk framework proposed by Aave founder Stani Kulechov and a recent rise in deposits from the June low. The bank’s bigger bet is on the broader trajectory of decentralized finance: it predicts that the value of tokenized assets deployed in DeFi will grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030, fueled by the expansion of stablecoins, tokenized real-world assets from TradFi giants, and rising crypto prices.

Because Aave collects fees primarily through the spread between what it pays depositors and what it charges borrowers, the bank argues that its revenues — and by extension, the token price — should closely track that growth.

Yet the prediction is associated with considerable uncertainty. Standard Chartered itself warns that scaling up Aave’s institutional lending arm, known as Aave Horizon, is “feasible but not yet proven” and depends on partnerships with traditional financial firms that have yet to be achieved at scale.

Digital asset prices also remain notoriously volatile Bitcoin fall to a 21-month low on Wednesday and most other major assets fell along with it. AAVE rose above $77 earlier in the day following the release of the report, but then gave up most of its gains as the market sputtered. However, it has since surpassed $79, up nearly 9% on the day Bitcoin begins to recover.

In addition to projecting AAVE to reach $3,500 by the end of 2030, Standard Chartered’s report lists price targets of $40,000 for Ethereum (from $1,614 at the time of writing) and $500,000 for Bitcoin (currently $60,831).