Geoff Kendrick said Aave has moved past the disruption tied to April’s cyberattack and is now positioned to benefit from the continued expansion of tokenized assets and decentralized finance.

Standard Chartered’s head of digital assets research has begun coverage of Aave (AAVE), forecasting the token could reach $3,500 by the end of 2030 as DeFi activity and real-world asset tokenization accelerate.

The projection implies close to a 50x increase from AAVE’s current price near $70, with the potential to outperform both Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) over the same period, according to the report.

Kendrick noted that Aave has “moved past the April cybertheft incident” as capital returns to the protocol, adding that it remains strongly positioned to preserve its leadership in on-chain lending.

The April exploit involving KelpDAO’s rsETH bridge triggered significant turmoil in DeFi after attackers used roughly $290 million in stolen assets as collateral on Aave to borrow real funds.

The incident exposed the protocol to potential losses of up to $230 million, prompted user withdrawals, and underscored how risks in one DeFi application can rapidly spread across the ecosystem.

Kendrick compared Aave to a fully automated, blockchain-based lending platform that functions without intermediaries or human decision-making. At its peak in October 2025, the protocol held around $75 billion in deposits, placing it alongside major global banks in scale.

Looking forward, he expects the value of tokenized assets used within DeFi to grow about 37-fold by the end of the decade. Because Aave’s revenue is closely tied to lending volumes and deposits, that expansion could translate directly into meaningful upside for the AAVE token.

The report also highlighted a potential restart of Aave’s token buyback program as an additional catalyst. Its Horizon initiative, designed for lending against tokenized real-world assets in a permissioned environment, could also draw in institutional capital and accelerate adoption.

Despite recent weakness across digital assets, Kendrick said the broader backdrop is improving, with Aave likely to be a key beneficiary as liquidity returns to DeFi markets.

Aave last traded up 5.6% over 24 hours at around $76.