Standard Chartered Sets $10 Arbitrum Target on Robinhood and Tokenization Growth

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum's ARB token on Tuesday with an end-2030 price target of $10, arguing that Arbitrum's business is licensing its technology to traditional finance firms and taking a share of what those firms earn.

Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets research, forecasts ARB at $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 by end-2027, $3.50 by end-2028, $6.50 by end-2029 and $10.00 by end-2030, according to the note, titled "Arbitrum – The blockchain for TradFi.”

All five figures are new; the bank had no prior forecast. Over the same horizon Standard Chartered has bitcoin reaching $500,000 and ether $40,000, from $100,000 and $4,000 at the end of this year.

ARB traded at $0.137 on Tuesday, up 1% over 24 hours and down 21% over seven days, for a market capitalization of $916 million, according to CoinGecko. The token is up 87% over 30 days.

Ten Percent Of Everything

The bank is pricing ARB as a claim on revenue the token does not currently receive. Arbitrum's fee income accrues to a DAO treasury controlled by token holders, which the report notes, saying the token "has no direct way of accruing such value at present."

Arbitrum earns from four lines, per the note: Arbitrum One transaction fees, at around 97% gross margin; treasury management returns; Timeboost express-lane auctions; and Arbitrum Expansion Program fees, charged when another chain settles transactions elsewhere using Arbitrum's stack.

The AEP fee is 10% of a licensee's net protocol revenue, split 8% to the Arbitrum DAO and 2% to developers. Robinhood Chain, which went live on July 1, is the most prominent such arrangement, and The Defiant covered the terms when the chain launched.

That line is now larger than Arbitrum's own chain. Arbitrum One collected $17,909 in chain fees over 24 hours and $454,175 over 30 days, DefiLlama data shows. Robinhood Chain collected $448,616 in the same 24 hours and $37.31 million over 30 days. DefiLlama books the difference between a chain's fees and its revenue as Ethereum data costs plus the AEP share; on Robinhood Chain that gap came to $3.24 million over the first 14 days of September, against $32.31 million of fees.

On treasury management, the note says Arbitrum deploys around $100 million of its non-ARB holdings into DeFi — about half in ETH and derivatives and a quarter each in real-world assets and stablecoins — and earns $200,000 to $250,000 a month in interest.

The $2 Million Assumption

Standard Chartered puts Arbitrum's September revenue at around $5 million, more than five times its level before Robinhood Chain launched, and above the previous monthly record of $4.4 million set in October 2025, when ARB averaged $0.35.

The arithmetic behind that figure assumes Robinhood Chain produces $60 million of gross fees for the month, or $2 million a day. September is running below that. The chain collected $32.31 million in fees over the first 14 days of the month, an average of $2.31 million a day, but the last seven days averaged $908,450 and Sept. 14 came in at $448,616, DefiLlama's series shows. Holding the recent rate through month-end puts September at roughly $47 million.

Fees peaked at $6.04 million on Sept. 4 and have fallen 93% since. The Defiant reported the 83% decline through Sept. 10; the drop has continued for four more sessions while decentralized exchange volume held at $1.84 billion over the past 24 hours. The run-up that produced the peak came from a memecoin launchpad and a trading bot, after gas on the chain rose 82-fold in 11 days.

Standard Chartered's note cites daily fee revenue that "recently touched USD 8mn" and a September average of $2.8 million, both drawn from Token Terminal, which tracks the chain on a different basis than DefiLlama.

Reinvested Earnings

ARB is a governance token with no burn and no buyback. Fees are "held as a form of 'reinvested earnings'," the note says, comparing the setup to Aave and Chainlink, and adds that "as the ecosystem matures, a token buyback programme should become more likely."

Of ARB's 10 billion maximum supply, 92.3% has vested, with the final tranche due in March 2027. Circulating supply is 6.678 billion, CoinGecko data shows.

The gap between revenue and token claim has been the subject of DAO debate for most of the year, including a $45 million Arbitrum Foundation funding request that delegates challenged as spending above DAO revenue.

A Multiple Of 1.3

Standard Chartered values Arbitrum on market capitalization against annualized three-month ecosystem fees, the metric it applies to layer 1s. ARB's multiple is 1.3. The equivalent averages for Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche are as much as 25 times higher, per the note, while the three chains' fees as a percentage of ecosystem activity are similar to Arbitrum's.

The bank attributes the gap to investors rewarding layer 1s for being layer 1s, and expects it to close. The one functional difference it identifies is that Arbitrum settles to Ethereum rather than providing its own security.

Arbitrum ranks second among layer 2s by total value locked on DefiLlama at $1.39 billion, and $2.33 billion counting Robinhood Chain's $936 million. Base holds $5.59 billion.

Four Trillion By 2028

The forecast sits on three projections: tokenized assets, covering stablecoins and real-world assets, growing to $4 trillion by end-2028 from about $340 billion; the share of those assets deployed in DeFi rising to 30% by 2030 from 3.5%; and tokenized equities reaching $750 billion by end-2028, a 250-fold increase.

Tokenized stocks currently carry $2.92 billion in distributed value, up 17.31% over 30 days, according to rwa.xyz. Ondo leads issuers at $837.4 million, followed by bStocks at $684.6 million and Backed Finance's xStocks at $618.8 million. Robinhood's 189 tokenized assets total $152.0 million. The note puts Robinhood's stock tokens at around $200 million, with $170 million on Robinhood Chain and $30 million on Arbitrum One.

Standard Chartered lists as risks a slower pace of tokenization, competition from other chains, and the absence of direct value accrual to ARB. It also names the unpassed Clarity Act and pending SEC guidelines, and the US Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation's own tokenization work, as reasons picking a winner is difficult.

The bank has issued 2030 targets for several DeFi tokens this year, including $100 for UNI, which Kendrick later said may be too low because of Robinhood Chain activity, plus $200 for LINK and $3,500 for AAVE.