Standard Chartered calls ARB to $10 but flags little value reaching token holders

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Arbitrum’s ARB token, setting a $10 target for the end of 2030 and a target of $0.50 before the end of this year.

The bank expects ARB to outperform bitcoin and ether over that period, though its own note acknowledges holders capture little of the revenue underpinning the call.

Robinhood Chain pushed Arbitrum revenue past 5 times its pre-launch level

The $10 figure is about 66 times what ARB traded on Tuesday at ~$0.15. Standard Chartered set out a staircase of $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 in 2027, $3.50 in 2028, $6.50 in 2029, and then the 2030 goal.

Geoff Kendrick, who runs digital assets research at the bank, said in a note to clients that ARB should outperform the two largest cryptocurrencies over that window. This same house pegs ether at $4,000 this year and $40,000 by 2030.

Bitcoin gets $100,000 this year and $500,000 by 2030.

Kendrick’s team started covering Chainlink last month with a 2030 target of $200 and has made similar 2030 calls for Uniswap and other DeFi names.

All these depend on the same tokenization forecast. Each frames its token as a better performer than bitcoin and ether.

What distinguishes Arbitrum, according to the bank, is a revenue stream that came in July. Any chain built using Arbitrum tech that settles outside of Arbitrum One or Nova under the Arbitrum Expansion Program will return 10% of its net protocol revenue.

The highlight customer is Robinhood Chain, which launched on July 1.

On September 1, Robinhood Chain users paid $3.75 million in fees, briefly sending the two-month-old network ahead of Ethereum mainnet and Base for the day.

Standard Chartered estimates the chain’s daily fee revenue at an average of $2.8 million in the first two weeks of September.

It forecasts that Arbitrum will rake in about $5 million in Expansion Program fees this month at that rate. The bank said Arbitrum’s monthly revenue is now more than five times its level before Robinhood Chain existed.

That rate has since fallen. Robinhood Chain fees peaked at $6.04 million on September 4 and came to $448,616 on September 14.

“We see digital assets transitioning from a state where revenue is not yet relevant to one where revenue is critical,” Kendrick wrote. He added that Arbitrum’s model is “heavily focused on revenue” and the token should benefit.

He also anticipates more traditional finance chains on the same stack, raising the likelihood of more fees and, in his view, a re-rating of ARB to layer-1 valuations.

$4 trillion in tokenized assets by 2028 holds the forecast up

Standard Chartered expects the value of assets flowing on-chain to increase to $4 trillion by the end of 2028 from ~$340 billion today, with tokenized equities alone expected to be $750 billion.

Kendrick regards Arbitrum as enterprise plumbing for banks and asset managers seeking to transfer instruments onto blockchains.

He pointed to the DTCC’s work on tokenized equities and the pending Clarity Act as positive developments that have not yet landed.

The $4 trillion number is the operative assumption underlying the bank’s coverage of crypto. Kendrick mentioned the $4 trillion number in the August Chainlink call, where he put LINK at $200 by 2030.

Standard Chartered has flagged its own risks. Tokenization could move slower than the model predicts.

Competing blockchains could steal a share. And ARB captures little direct value from the fees going through the network.

Earlier, Cryptopolitan covered the Expansion Program, where the 10% cut is divided into 8% to the Arbitrum DAO treasury and 2% to a developer guild. This corresponds to ~$1.32 million over 30 days by early September.

The money is used to run the DAO and does not automatically go to the pockets of ARB holders.

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