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

Standard Chartered has opened coverage on Arbitrum's ARB token with a bullish end-2030 price objective of $10, laid out in a note titled "Arbitrum – The blockchain for TradFi." The bank's global head of digital assets research, Geoff Kendrick, published a stepped forecast that starts at $0.50 by the end of 2026 and rises to $10 by 2030. The report frames Arbitrum's business model around licensing its technology to traditional finance firms and taking a percentage of the revenue those licensees generate. The bank's valuation hinges heavily on the Arbitrum Expansion Program (AEP), which charges licensees 10% of net protocol revenue — split 8% to the Arbitrum DAO and 2% to developers. Robinhood Chain, which launched on July 1, is cited as the most prominent AEP arrangement and has driven a sharp rise in fee activity: DefiLlama shows Robinhood Chain collected $448,616 in a 24-hour window and $37.31 million over 30 days, versus Arbitrum One's $17,909 and $454,175 respectively for the same periods. DefiLlama also reports a gap on Robinhood Chain attributable to Ethereum data costs plus the AEP share, which amounted to $3.24 million over the first 14 days of September against $32.31 million of fees. Standard Chartered models September revenue for Arbitrum at about $5 million, a level the bank says exceeds pre-Robinhood Chain activity and tops the prior monthly record of $4.4 million set in October 2025. That calculation assumes Robinhood Chain could produce roughly $60 million in gross monthly fees (about $2 million per day). Actual on-chain data show volatility: fees peaked at $6.04 million on Sept. 4 and have fallen about 93% since that high, with recent seven-day averages and single-day figures below the bank's assumed daily rate. Token Terminal, which the bank also cites, reports daily fee figures that "recently touched USD 8mn" and a September average of $2.8 million, a different measurement basis than DefiLlama. On tokenomics and valuation, the note emphasizes that ARB is a governance token without a burn or buyback program; fees accrue to the DAO treasury rather than to the token directly. Of ARB's 10 billion maximum supply, 92.3% has vested and the final tranche is due in March 2027, with a circulating supply of 6.678 billion (CoinGecko). Standard Chartered values ARB using market capitalization against annualized three-month ecosystem fees, producing a multiple of 1.3 for ARB versus averages up to 25 for some layer-1s. The bank's $10 target also depends on macro assumptions about tokenized assets — projecting tokenized assets grow to $4 trillion by end-2028 from roughly $340 billion, a rise in the share deployed into DeFi to 30% by 2030 from 3.5%, and tokenized equities reaching $750 billion by end-2028.