Standard Chartered coverage: Arbitrum and tokenization outlook

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum’s ARB token and presents a thesis that ties the network’s role as a layer-2 infrastructure provider to a large upside from tokenization and TradFi migration on-chain. The bank set a five-point price path that reaches $10 by end-2030, up from roughly $0.14 at the time of reporting, with intermediate targets of $0.50 for 2026, $1.50 for 2027, $3.50 for 2028 and $6.50 for 2029. The 2030 projection equates to about a 70x increase versus the then-current price.

The note frames Arbitrum’s business as licensing its stack to traditional finance firms and collecting a share of the resulting protocol revenue. Robinhood Chain is the prominent example: under the Arbitrum Expansion Program the licensee pays 10% of net protocol revenue, split 8% to the Arbitrum DAO and 2% to developers. Standard Chartered estimates Arbitrum’s revenue could reach roughly $5 million in September, more than five times its pre-Robinhood run rate and above the prior monthly record of $4.4 million in October 2025.

Standard Chartered models revenues from four lines: Arbitrum One transaction fees, treasury management returns, Timeboost auctions, and AEP fees from licensees. The bank also projects tokenized assets rising to $4 trillion by end-2028 and a material increase in assets deployed in DeFi, which together could lift Arbitrum’s revenue and narrow the valuation gap with layer-1 networks. It flags risks including slower tokenization, competition, the lack of direct value accrual to ARB today, and regulatory uncertainties that complicate picking a single winner.

Bank research as short-term catalyst

Two recent reports add fresh detail to the market reaction and the limits of the bank-driven narrative. One analysis quantified the same‑session move after Standard Chartered’s note: ARB rose about 5.77% while Bitcoin and Ethereum fell roughly 3.91% and 5.74%, respectively, producing double‑digit percentage‑point abnormal returns versus both majors and an L2 peer basket in that single trading session — a tighter, testable instance of the initiation-as-catalyst idea. The other report pushes back on the revenue extrapolations underpinning the thesis: Robinhood Chain produced an isolated daily fee peak (a reported $6.04 million), then saw activity collapse by over 90%, with daily fees drifting toward roughly $500,000 by mid‑September, undermining the sustainability of the month‑long AEP revenue assumptions. That critique is reinforced by a material supply event on Sept. 16 when about 92.6 million ARB were released (roughly $14 million), introducing meaningful short‑term selling pressure. Taken together, these developments suggest Standard Chartered’s research can move a token in the short run, but the persistence of any repricing depends heavily on whether AEP revenues prove durable and whether on‑chain supply flows stabilise.