Summary
- According to Standard Chartered, Uniswap's UNI token may experience a nearly 40-fold increase in value by 2030 as Wall Street shifts real-world assets onto blockchain.
- Analyst Geoff Kendrick highlighted that Uniswap’s automated market-making model and established guidelines position it as a key open market infrastructure layer.
- The anticipated activation of Uniswap’s "fee switch" in late 2025 is expected to enhance the scarcity of the token, which is currently burning around 1% of its total supply each year.
Standard Chartered’s Geoff Kendrick has projected that the value of Uniswap’s native token, UNI, could nearly increase by 40 times in the upcoming years, surpassing both Bitcoin and Ethereum as Wall Street embraces blockchain technology, as noted in a report released on Monday.
As a leading DeFi platform, the decentralized exchange stands to gain significantly from a surge in digital assets that mirror traditional investments, Kendrick indicated, with a price target of $100 for UNI by 2030.
Kendrick’s forecast is based on Uniswap’s structural impartiality, which allows Wall Street firms to confidently utilize its platform without concerns over changing rules as tokenized assets grow. He likened Uniswap to YouTube, with Coinbase being compared to Netflix.
“From the perspective of traditional finance (TradFi) institutions, Uniswap should be regarded less as a retail DEX application and more as market infrastructure that TradFi can integrate with as tokenized assets expand and TradFi operators wish to connect them to DeFi,” Kendrick elaborated.
As of Monday, Uniswap's UNI token was trading at approximately $2.72, marking a 9.8% rise over the previous day, according to CoinGecko. Despite its longstanding dominance in the decentralized exchange space, the token once peaked at around $45 five years ago.
Since its launch in 2018, Uniswap has facilitated over $3.7 trillion in trading volume and generated $5.6 billion in fees, as reported by DeFiLlama.
Standard Chartered anticipates that by the end of the decade, the value of digital assets in DeFi protocols could reach $2.7 trillion. This could result in Uniswap’s liquidity pools having 37 times more assets available for trading on the blockchain, Kendrick noted.
There is a direct correlation between Uniswap’s protocol fees and trading volumes, suggesting that as tokenized assets become more prevalent on-chain, the platform’s upcoming “UNIfication” upgrade in late 2025 will automatically lead to increased token burns, Kendrick added.
Kendrick pointed out that since the fee activation in December, UNI's total supply has decreased to approximately 895 million from 1 trillion, a reduction bolstered by a substantial retroactive burn and a current annual burn rate of about 1%.
Despite its pivotal role in the DeFi landscape for years, Kendrick warned that Uniswap could face competition from smaller entities that might offer more tailored solutions for specific needs. Additionally, he noted potential challenges arising from the establishment of compliance regulations surrounding tokenization.
Nonetheless, Kendrick observed that a viable path for tokenized assets to utilize decentralized settlement appears to be emerging. In February, BlackRock announced its tokenized money market fund, BUIDL, would be accessible via UniswapX, which is an auction-based swapping protocol, with asset issuance managed through the tokenization platform Securitize.
At that time, the world’s largest asset manager indicated plans to acquire UNI tokens, according to a source familiar with the situation. Kendrick also projected that the price of the digital asset could reach $6.50 by the end of this year.