Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Arbitrum's ARB token with a $10 end-2030 price target, arguing that revenue from enterprise chains such as Robinhood Chain could strengthen Arbitrum's economics. The bank's base case implies roughly seventyfold upside from ARB's current price near $0.13.
Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum's ARB token with an end-2030 price target of $10, implying roughly seventyfold upside from today's level. Geoff Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, set interim targets of $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 for 2027, $3.50 for 2028 and $6.50 for 2029 before reaching $10 in 2030.
ARB traded around $0.13 when the note was published, with a market capitalization below $1 billion. Standard Chartered's projections are forecasts and are not guaranteed outcomes.
Robinhood Chain drives the revenue case
Kendrick's thesis centers on Arbitrum licensing its technology to financial firms that want dedicated blockchain networks. Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, chains that settle outside Arbitrum One and Nova return 10% of net protocol revenue to the Arbitrum ecosystem, split eight points to ArbitrumDAO and two to the developer guild.
Robinhood Chain, which launched publicly on July 1, has become central to that model. The Arbitrum Foundation reported $360,000 in AEP license fees during July, representing 35% of ArbitrumDAO's income that month. For the first half of 2026, the DAO received $6.19 million across transaction fees, Timeboost, AEP payments and treasury income while processing 478 million transactions.
Robinhood Chain's fee revenue has since cooled. According to The Defiant, daily fees peaked at $6.04 million on Sept. 4 and have fallen 93% since. Standard Chartered still expects Arbitrum to collect roughly $5 million in AEP fees for September overall, more than five times its pre-launch level.
Tokenization growth underpins the long-term thesis
The bank's second pillar rests on tokenized assets expanding from about $340 billion to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, with tokenized equities alone reaching $750 billion over the same period. Standard Chartered expects ARB to outperform Bitcoin and Ether through 2030 under its base forecast, which separately puts Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ether at $40,000 by 2030.
The bank also flagged Arbitrum's low market-cap-to-fees multiple of 1.3, as much as 25 times below comparable layer 1 networks — a gap Standard Chartered attributes to investors rewarding layer 1s for being layer 1s and expects to close over time.
Standard Chartered listed slower tokenization, competition from other blockchain networks, and ARB's limited direct value accrual as risks. ARB holders govern the DAO and its treasury, but the governance token does not automatically distribute network revenue to holders — a structure the bank cited as a risk to a higher valuation.
Sources: crypto.news, The Defiant
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