Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum’s ARB token with a $10 price target for the end of 2030, a call implying roughly a 70-fold gain from the $0.13 level where the token traded when the note landed. Geoff Kendrick, the bank’s global head of digital assets research, argues Arbitrum is becoming an enterprise infrastructure provider for traditional finance, and that its fee model will finally make the token’s valuation about revenue rather than sentiment.
ARB jumped more than 12% to around $0.15 after the note, one of the few green assets in a market that lost 6.26% of its total capitalization in 24 hours following the Senate’s failure to advance the Clarity Act. Bitcoin slid to $75,856 in the same session and XRP lost more than 9%, which makes the single-stock-style move on a bank research note stand out even more.
The revenue thesis
Kendrick’s core argument is laid out in one line from the note: “We see digital assets transitioning from a state where revenue is not yet relevant to one where revenue is critical. Arbitrum’s business model is heavily focused on revenue, and as such, the ARB token should benefit.”
The mechanism is the Arbitrum Expansion Program. External chains built on Arbitrum’s technology stack pay the ecosystem a rolling fee equal to 10% of their net protocol revenue. The first major example is Robinhood Chain, which launched July 1 using Arbitrum’s stack. Standard Chartered estimates Arbitrum will collect about $5 million in AEP fees in September at the current run rate, roughly five times its monthly revenue before the Robinhood launch. Arbitrum’s previous record month was $4.4 million in October 2025.
That makes Robinhood Chain the test case for the whole model. If one retail brokerage moving tokenized equities on-chain can quintuple a layer-2’s fee revenue in its first full month, the bank’s argument goes, the addressable market is every traditional financial firm that wants its own chain.
The year-by-year path
The bank did not just set a terminal target. It laid out milestones, each one a claim about how fast tokenization grows.
| Year-end | ARB target |
|---|---|
| 2026 | $0.50 |
| 2027 | $1.50 |
| 2028 | $3.50 |
| 2029 | $6.50 |
| 2030 | $10.00 |
Alongside the ARB path, Kendrick’s team projects bitcoin at $100,000 by end-2026 and $500,000 by end-2030, with ether at $4,000 and then $40,000 on the same schedule. The note says ARB should outperform both over the forecast horizon, which is a bold framing given ether’s own multiples. It also means the bank expects a token trading at $0.13 to beat an asset it expects to grow 5x over the same window.
Tokenized equities as the engine
The growth assumption underneath the targets is tokenization. Standard Chartered projects tokenized assets growing from roughly $3 billion today to $750 billion by the end of 2028, citing the Depository Trust and Clearing Corporation’s work on tokenized equities as part of the institutional backdrop. If traditional financial firms want their own chains rather than renting space on public networks, Arbitrum’s stack is positioned as the product they license, and the AEP fee is how Arbitrum gets paid.
Kendrick estimates Robinhood Chain generated $2.8 million in daily revenue in early September, though the bank’s own September estimate for Arbitrum’s share implies the run rate varies day to day. Daily figures this early in a launch are noisy, and a month of data will say more than the first week’s spikes.
The holes in the thesis
The note is candid about the structure problem. ARB is a governance token with no burn mechanism and no direct claim on the revenue the ecosystem collects. Kendrick likens it to Aave and Chainlink, both of which generate real protocol revenue that does not accrue to token holders directly. He thinks a buyback becomes more likely as the ecosystem matures, but that is a prediction about governance, not a property of the token. Holders are being asked to price in a value accrual change that has not happened yet.
Supply is the other counterweight. About 92.3% of the maximum 10 billion ARB has already vested, with the final tranche unlocking in March 2027. A 70-fold price move against a near-fully-vested supply means the market cap would have to grow by roughly the same multiple, into territory few layer-2 tokens have reached even at their cycle peaks. For comparison, ARB’s fully diluted valuation at the target price would be $100 billion, which would place it among the largest assets in crypto on paper.
There is also concentration risk in the revenue story itself. The five-fold jump in fees rests largely on one customer. If Robinhood’s on-chain equity volumes slow, or if Robinhood decides to run its chain on different technology after the initial term, the AEP projections reset. The thesis needs more Robinhoods, and it is too early to know whether the July launch was a template or an outlier.
Traders took the note as a signal anyway. ARB’s 12% move against a falling market shows how starved the sector is for a fundamental story after the Clarity Act failure. Whether the $10 target survives contact with 2030 depends on questions the note itself flags: whether tokenization grows on the projected curve, whether ARB holders ever get a claim on the revenue, and whether Arbitrum’s stack stays the default choice for institutions building chains.
The bank has a mixed record on crypto price calls, as all forecasters do, but the note matters less for the number than for the frame. It treats a layer-2 token as equity-like infrastructure with a revenue line, not a narrative trade. If more analysts adopt that frame, the sector’s valuation debate shifts from mindshare to cash flow, and that would be the real change here regardless of where ARB trades in 2030.