Geoff Kendrick said Aave has largely moved beyond the disruption caused by April’s cyberattack and is well placed to benefit from rising adoption of tokenized assets and decentralized finance.
Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research has initiated coverage on Aave (AAVE), projecting the token could reach $3,500 by the end of 2030 as DeFi activity and real-world asset tokenization expand.
That outlook implies almost a 50x increase from AAVE’s current price near $70, suggesting potential outperformance versus both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) over the same period, according to the report.
Kendrick said Aave has “moved past the April cybertheft incident” as funds gradually return to the protocol, adding that it remains strongly positioned to maintain its leadership in on-chain lending markets.
The April incident tied to KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge triggered major turbulence in DeFi after attackers used roughly $290 million in stolen assets as collateral on Aave to borrow real funds.
The exploit exposed the protocol to potential losses of up to $230 million, sparked withdrawals from users, and highlighted how failures in one DeFi application can quickly cascade across the ecosystem.
Kendrick compared Aave to a fully automated, blockchain-based lending system that operates without intermediaries or human discretion. At its peak in October 2025, the protocol held about $75 billion in deposits—placing it alongside some of the largest banks in the U.S. by scale.
Looking forward, he expects the value of tokenized assets used in DeFi to increase roughly 37-fold by the end of the decade. Because Aave’s revenues are closely tied to lending activity and deposits, that growth could translate directly into gains for the AAVE token.
The report also highlighted the potential restart of Aave’s token buyback program as an additional upside driver. Its Horizon initiative, which focuses on lending against tokenized real-world assets in a permissioned environment, could also attract institutional capital and speed up adoption.
Despite recent weakness across digital assets, Kendrick said the broader backdrop is improving, with Aave likely to benefit as liquidity returns to DeFi markets.
Aave was last up 5.6% over 24 hours, trading near $76.
