Standard Chartered (LON: STAN) has opened formal research coverage of Arbitrum with a long-dated bullish call on its ARB token. In a note issued on 15 September 2026, the bank said ARB could reach $10 by the end of 2030. The token was then trading near $0.14, so the target implies about a seventyfold increase over four years.
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, cast Arbitrum as “the blockchain for TradFi.”
In his view, the network’s real business is helping conventional financial firms move activity on-chain and then sharing in the economics of the chains those firms launch.
That positioning, he argued, puts Arbitrum in the path of a much larger tokenization market.
The bank expects tokenized assets to grow to $4 trillion by the end of 2028, from about $340 billion at the time of the note.
If even a portion of that activity runs on dedicated networks built with Arbitrum’s technology, protocol income could rise for years.
Arbitrum sits among the two leading Ethereum layer-2 networks, alongside Base, and it is distinguished by a fee model that captures value when other parties use its stack.
That model is simple.
When an external chain is built on Arbitrum’s technology, Arbitrum collects a rolling 10% of that chain’s net protocol revenue.
Kendrick pointed to Robinhood Chain, which launched on 1 July 2026, as the first large example.
The new network has been described as the fastest-growing chain on record by value locked.
On the bank’s math, it could generate around $5 million in fees for Arbitrum in September, more than five times the monthly run rate seen before the launch.
That jump in income is the immediate catalyst behind the coverage initiation.
It is also the reason the forecast is framed as a revenue story rather than a purely speculative price target.
Kendrick said investors still assign Arbitrum little value next to layer-1 networks such as Ethereum and Solana, even though the economic engine now looks more comparable.
He expects that valuation gap to narrow if fee growth continues and if more traditional firms copy the Robinhood approach.
The price path is gradual, not a single leap. Standard Chartered sees ARB at $0.50 by the end of 2026, then rising through subsequent years toward the $10 mark in 2030.
The implication is that markets would re-rate the token as recurring infrastructure fees become harder to ignore.None of this is guaranteed.
Tokenization could arrive more slowly than the $4 trillion figure assumes.
Competing blockchains could win the same institutional mandates. Robinhood Chain’s early fee burst may not prove durable.
And ARB does not currently pass protocol revenue straight through to holders, so the investment case still depends on markets treating rising network cash flow as relevant to the token.
Even with those caveats, the research marks a shift in how a major bank is willing to describe a layer-2 asset: less as a sidechain trade and more as a claim on infrastructure used by traditional finance. If that reading holds, ARB’s next cycle may be driven as much by licensed chains and tokenization volumes as by crypto-native activity.
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