Standard Chartered: Tokenization Could Push DeFi Assets to $2.7 Trillion by 2030

Standard Chartered's head of digital assets research projects decentralized finance total value locked growing 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by end of 2030, driven by the convergence of tokenized real-world assets and crypto-native capital moving into onchain protocols — a shift that could reshape how institutional capital accesses yield and liquidity.

The Forecast

Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, published a research note in June 2026 projecting that assets locked in decentralized finance protocols will grow from their current level to $2.7 trillion by the end of 2030 — a 37-fold increase. The expansion, Kendrick argued, will be driven by two convergent forces: tokenized real-world assets entering DeFi protocols, and crypto-native assets growing in scale alongside them.

"I think the next opportunity for generational wealth in digital assets is going to come via the DeFi protocols," Kendrick said in the research note. "I estimate that the amount of tokenized assets active in DeFi will 37x by the end of 2030."

Standard Chartered's analysis identified a critical gap in the current market: only 3% of stablecoins and 10% of tokenized RWAs are currently used in DeFi. Kendrick's model projects the share of tokenized value deployed into DeFi protocols to rise to 30% by end of 2030, from approximately 3.5% today — a nearly ninefold increase in the DeFi utilization rate alongside the underlying growth in tokenized asset supply.

Where Standard Chartered Has Been on This

This forecast builds on Standard Chartered's prior research. The bank had previously projected non-stablecoin tokenized RWAs growing to $2 trillion by end of 2028, with tokenized money-market funds and US equities accounting for most of the projected market. The new DeFi forecast assumes that as the tokenized asset base expands, an increasing proportion of those assets will move into DeFi protocols — for yield, lending, and trading — rather than sitting in custody-only structures.

Standard Chartered separately initiated equity-style research coverage of Aave, the largest DeFi lending protocol, with a year-by-year financial model and a $1.1B annual revenue target by 2030. That coverage — published in June 2026 — was noted as one of the first instances of a Tier-1 global bank publishing institutional-grade fundamental analysis of a DeFi protocol. It signals that Standard Chartered views DeFi not as a speculative sideshow but as an emerging capital markets infrastructure layer worth modeling at the same rigor as traditional finance instruments.

The Skeptics: Tokenization Does Not Guarantee Liquidity

Standard Chartered's bullish DeFi forecast comes with meaningful counterarguments in the market. Researchers have cautioned that tokenization does not automatically create deep or unified markets.

Axis CEO Chris Kim told Cointelegraph that issuing the same asset across multiple blockchains and formats can create siloed liquidity, pricing gaps, and higher costs — limiting how easily tokenized assets can be traded even as their overall market value grows. Ondo Finance's Oya Celiktemur noted at Paris Blockchain Week that tokenizing an illiquid asset does not "magically" make it liquid.

These are real structural risks. The DeFi TVL forecast assumes that liquidity will coalesce around interoperable protocols and that institutional compliance frameworks will evolve to permit DeFi participation at scale. Neither of those conditions is guaranteed by the tokenization trend alone.

Implications for XRPL and Onchain Infrastructure

If even a fraction of Standard Chartered's DeFi growth forecast materializes, the settlement infrastructure supporting it becomes a critical value layer. XRPL's combination of native AMM, DEX, tokenization support, and sub-cent transaction costs positions it well for the tokenized asset DeFi use case — particularly where institutional compliance requirements intersect with high-volume settlement needs.

The XRPL's AMM upgrade and ongoing amendment proposals around expanded DeFi functionality are directly responsive to the market Standard Chartered is forecasting. The RWA market reaching $51 billion in 2026 is the foundation; the question is which settlement and liquidity infrastructure captures the DeFi activation layer as institutional participation scales.