Standard Chartered says Arbitrum could outperform Bitcoin, Ether through 2030

Standard Chartered's digital assets research team argued that Arbitrum could emerge as a leading performer among crypto assets through 2030 as more traditional financial assets migrate onchain. In a note shared with Cointelegraph, Geoff Kendrick said Arbitrum's underlying economics — including a built-in share of protocol revenue from projects that deploy on its network — give the layer-2 a structural advantage if tokenization accelerates.

A key element of the bank's case is that Arbitrum receives 10% of net protocol revenue generated by companies building on its platform. Kendrick pointed to Robinhood Chain, the brokerage's layer-2 project that launched in July, as the first major example. He said Robinhood Chain has materially altered Arbitrum's economics: at its current run rate Arbitrum is expected to generate about $5 million in revenue in September, which the note says is more than five times the network's revenue before Robinhood Chain went live.

Using those dynamics, Kendrick set a bullish price pathway for Arbitrum's native token, ARB, suggesting it could reach as high as $10 by 2030 — roughly a 70-fold increase from levels cited in the note. The research flagged the principal downside risks to that outlook as a slower-than-expected pace of asset tokenization and greater competition from alternative blockchains. The note also contrasted the ARB projection with the bank's expected returns for Bitcoin and Ether over the same period, placing ARB's upside materially higher.

The broader tokenization story underpins Standard Chartered's stance. The note cites RWA.xyz data showing nearly $39 billion in cumulative tokenized real-world assets and reiterates the bank's forecast that tokenized assets could grow to $4 trillion by the end of 2028 as banks and asset managers bring more holdings onchain. Standard Chartered said those trends could lift protocols like Arbitrum — which can host other layer-2 networks and collect a share of their revenue — and has also cited tokenization in bullish views on Chainlink and parts of decentralized finance.