Chainlink's LINK could be worth $200 by 2030

Standard Chartered Sets Bold LINK Target

Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of $LINK with a price target of $200 by end-2030. The forecast implies a roughly 25-fold gain from around $8 today and would represent outperformance of both Bitcoin and Ethereum over the period.

Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, laid out staged targets in a note: $13 by the end of this year, then $41, $82, and $133 before reaching $200. The call positions @Chainlink as the essential data and settlement layer for a coming wave of institutional tokenization.

Kendrick expects the value of tokenized assets on-chain to climb roughly 12-fold to $4 trillion by end-2028 from about $340 billion today, and assets deployed in DeFi to grow 37-fold to $2.7 trillion by 2030. Because Chainlink charges for delivering data and moving assets between chains, the bank estimates its fees should rise about 25 times over that period, and assumes the token price follows fees.

Why CCIP and CRE Matter for the Thesis

The bank's conviction rests heavily on the adoption of Chainlink's Cross-Chain Interoperability Protocol (CCIP) and its Chainlink Runtime Environment (CRE) by sovereign and institutional actors. CCIP has emerged as the preferred standard for connecting different blockchain networks in institutional financial applications, allowing smart contracts on different chains to send messages and transfer assets in a secure, standardized way.

CCIP now supports 60-plus public and private blockchains and secures $33.6 billion in cross-chain tokens, with cross-chain transfer volumes surging 1,972% to $7.77 billion in 2025. Recent production deployments underscore the momentum: Visa, ANZ, ChinaAMC, and Fidelity International completed a cross-border settlement solution powered by Chainlink under the Hong Kong Monetary Authority's e-HKD program, enabling secure transfers of regulated assets with automated compliance and atomic settlement.

Coinbase also selected Chainlink's CCIP as the exclusive bridge infrastructure for its wrapped assets, while DeFi protocols including Aave and Lido upgraded their oracle and cross-chain infrastructure to support institutional-grade use cases.

The Standard Chartered note is not without caveats. Risks flagged include institutional tokenization scaling more slowly than expected, pilots failing to become recurring production workflows, specialist providers taking share, and technical failures denting confidence. The $200 target requires, in effect, that Chainlink becomes embedded in global financial infrastructure at a level comparable to core settlement rails. Investors should treat any long-range price forecast as speculative.

Sources:
Yahoo Finance: Standard Chartered Sees $4T Tokenization Driving Chainlink to $200 by 2030
Yahoo Finance: Chainlink Extends Lead in On-chain Finance as Institutional Adoption Grows
Chainlink: Quarterly Review Q1 2026