Author: Jae, PANews

Following UNI, Standard Chartered Bank has once again made bold claims about the crypto industry: AAVE is expected to soar 50 times before the end of 2030, reaching $3,500.

Related Reading: Standard Chartered Bank sets a 40x "bet", predicting UNI to rise to $100

Aggressive rhetoric and exaggerated multiples, combined with a familiar storyline: AAVE's price surged past $80, with a 24-hour increase nearing 20%. The on-chain lending market is in an uproar, with some cheering for traditional giants bullish on AAVE, while others mock Standard Chartered Bank as yet another sell-side falling into a frenzy.

Aave's next battle will ignite amid the intertwining of fantasy and reality.

Standard Chartered Bank illustrates a 50-fold increase roadmap for AAVE using Excel

If Standard Chartered Bank's research report on AAVE could be condensed into one sentence, it would be: Deposit size determines loan capacity, loan capacity drives fee income, and fee income ultimately transforms into token market value. Over the past 12 months, approximately 90% of Aave's fee income has come from the net interest margin of deposit and loan.

The traditional valuation framework based on linear mapping logic has been directly applied by Standard Chartered to the lending protocol, and according to its pricing model, AAVE will follow a step-like upward curve.

Standard Chartered's assumptions stem from the prediction of two major trends in the DeFi sector:

• DeFi TVL (Total Value Locked) will grow 37 times. Standard Chartered predicts that by 2030, the total active assets in DeFi will grow 37 times from the current level, reaching approximately $27 trillion. The driving force comes from a $2 trillion expansion in stablecoin size and the on-chain wave of RWA (real-world assets).

• The penetration rate of RWA in DeFi will increase from 3.5% to 30%. This means that trillions of dollars in traditional assets will flow into on-chain lending protocols.

Looking back at last October's peak, Aave once managed deposits as high as $75 billion. If viewed as a traditional bank, this amount would qualify it among the top 35 banks in the United States.

Standard Chartered believes Aave's operational efficiency far exceeds that of traditional banks relying on physical branches and redundant manpower. Once the tokenization wave arrives, Aave will capture the arbitrage from RWA on-chain and convert it into tangible protocol revenue through its Horizon licensed lending market and its stablecoin GHO's rates.

Regarding the capital flight caused by the KelpDAO rsETH bridging security incident in April this year, Standard Chartered classifies it as a brief fluctuation during the bottoming phase, not a long-term destruction of the protocol fundamentals.

Even setting aside the long-term narrative, looking back to the mid-term perspective, Aave's fundamentals are still robust.

On June 18, Grayscale released an in-depth report on Aave, for the first time applying traditional finance's DCF (Discounted Cash Flow) model and P/E (Price-to-Earnings) method to the valuation of DeFi protocols.

Grayscale concluded: AAVE is a typical cash flow-driven asset, currently priced in an undervalued range.

Grayscale emphasized that Aave's total protocol revenue for 2025 could reach $142 million, boasting healthy cash flow. More importantly, the token buyback and burn program initiated by the Aave DAO last April, along with the "Aave Will Win" proposal for shifting product earnings to token holders, has mechanically opened the pathway for "protocol self-sustenance → token appreciation."

Monopolizing 80% of profits with half the TVL in the same sector, some idle funds become Achilles' heel

Beyond the macro landscapes drawn by institutional capital, Aave has established a deep moat at the micro level.

First, the unexpected breakthrough of the next-generation technical architecture Aave V4. As the largest underlying architecture rewrite for the protocol since 2020, V4 uses a "liquidity hub + spokes (Hub-and-Spoke)" design to break the isolation effect of past single-chain liquidity. As of now, V4's total deposits have exceeded $200 million, with loan scale approaching $60 million.

Even more remarkable is its profitability. On-chain data analytics firm MSB Intel pointed out that from the beginning of the year to now, Aave has generated approximately $43.3 million in "protocol retained earnings," accounting for 80.7% of total profits in the sector. Protocols like Maple Finance, Fluid, and Venus trailing behind have each not exceeded $5 million in individual profits, not comparable to Aave.

In the traditional business world, a company’s worth often depends on net profits, not total assets. Retained earnings are an indicator that realistically reflects the net value creation capability of the protocol on-chain after deducting related operating costs and token inflation incentives.

In other words, Aave uses nearly half the TVL of the entire sector to capture over 80% of the system's net profits. This near-monopolistic profit structure is the hardest cornerstone of Standard Chartered Bank's 50-fold prediction.

On the flip side, the structural issues raised by the crypto research firm Delphi Digital remain a challenge to be resolved. The root of the problem lies within Aave's Peer-to-Pool lending model.

According to estimates by Delphi Digital, Aave experiences an annual invisible loss (Deadweight Loss) of as high as $52 million due to idle funds in the three main markets of WETH, USDT, and USDC, nearly equivalent to half of its annualized net income for the first quarter of 2026.

The systematic disconnection between deposit rates and borrowing rates is an inherent flaw of the Peer-to-Pool model. To ensure depositors can redeem at any time without loss, Aave must maintain a massive idle liquidity buffer within the fund pool. This leads to depositors typically receiving rates that are 25% to 35% lower than those paid by borrowers. The difference is the opportunity cost of idle funds. Even if the DAO governance layer adjusts the reserve ratio to 0, the invisible loss from idle funds would still reach $36 million.

The KelpDAO incident in April further revealed the fragility of this model. After hackers drained nearly $200 million worth of WETH, the WETH fund pool's utilization rate was locked at 100% for 5 days, preventing ordinary deposit users from withdrawing or participating in liquidation, leaving Aave with a scar that has yet to heal.

This structural flaw makes Aave susceptible to "upstream risks," and combined with its innate low capital efficiency, it has given latecomers the opportunity to break through. Emerging lending protocols like Morpho, which emphasize modular isolation, peer-to-peer matching, and minimalist underlying design, are eating into Aave's market share from the efficiency front, becoming its strongest challengers beneath the throne.

Looking back from the midpoint of 2026, Aave stands at the corner of fantasy and reality.

The "$3,500" vision painted by Standard Chartered reflects the traditional finance ambition for asset tokenization. Compared to the growth in TVL numbers, Aave's future focus will be on finding a viable path to support a trillion-dollar asset scale.

The throne of DeFi lending remains, but the foundation beneath the throne still needs a reconstruction or reinforcement.

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