Standard Chartered: LINK Could Climb 25x to $200 if Tokenized Assets Hit $4T by 2028

01What Happened

Standard Chartered's global head of digital asset research, Geoff Kendrick, published a forecast on Monday — shared with Cointelegraph — arguing that Chainlink's LINK token is significantly undervalued relative to where the tokenization market is headed. His base case: LINK reaches $200 by the end of 2030, up from roughly $8 at the time of the report, a gain of more than 25 times.

The logic isn't about LINK trading momentum. It's structural: Kendrick expects tokenized real-world assets — things like bonds, equities, and funds represented onchain — to scale to $4 trillion by the end of 2028. Moving that much traditional financial value onto blockchains means someone has to feed it trustworthy external data (prices, reserves, settlement confirmations) securely. That's the job of a blockchain oracle, and it's the business Chainlink has built.

More of that data flow running through Chainlink's network, in Kendrick's model, increases the fees the protocol generates — the mechanism he expects to eventually show up in LINK's price.

02Why It Matters

That's a strong competitive claim from a bank analyst, not an independent audit — worth reading as Standard Chartered's institutional view rather than settled fact. Still, it reframes LINK less as a speculative altcoin and more as a bet on financial-infrastructure plumbing: if traditional finance keeps moving onchain at the pace Kendrick expects, the toll booth for verified external data becomes structurally important regardless of any single token's price history.

03The Numbers

04Market Reaction

The forecast lands alongside independently reported demand data: tokenized RWA trading on decentralized exchanges hit an all-time high of $141 billion in July, a 19.5% increase from the prior month, driven largely by tokenized public equities, according to data provider CryptoRank. That's a real, already-observed trend cited in the report — distinct from Kendrick's forward-looking price target.

On market position, Chainlink is described as the leading decentralized oracle provider for crosschain communication, with $34.4 billion in total value secured, versus $7.36 billion for the next-largest network, Chronicle, per DefiLlama figures cited in the report.

⚠️ The source does not report how LINK's price moved immediately after the forecast was published, nor any trading-volume reaction — that detail simply isn't in the underlying report.

05What's Next / Things to Watch

06FAQs