Standard Chartered (LON: STAN) is building research into the access layer of its digital-asset franchise, treating analysis of decentralized finance as infrastructure rather than a side commentary on Bitcoin.
This year, the banking institution has placed a dedicated digital assets research desk beside ETF access and stablecoin services under the heading of how clients reach digital assets as an asset class.
The same materials cite an internal “DeFi 101” note as a source for projections on tokenized real-world assets, and they track total value locked in on-chain lending and other protocols as evidence that financial intermediation is being rewired.
That placement is deliberate.
The presentation frames digital assets as representations of value or rights recorded on blockchains, enabling faster and programmable settlement.
It argues that as digital money and on-chain rails scale, banks that become trusted connectors in client flows can capture a disproportionate share of activity.
Research sits inside that connector role: clients need a bank-grade way to understand what they are being offered, not only a place to custody or trade it.
The bank describes its own path in three stages.
From 2016 to 2021 it explored the ecosystem, including early investments and an initial digital-asset risk framework.
From 2021 to 2025 it built institutional foundations: group-wide risk management, on-chain analytics, an in-house platform, custody inside securities services, and crypto trading in markets, plus ventures for trading, custody, and tokenization.
From 2026 it says the focus is scaling and integration across the footprint, covering custody of crypto and tokenized assets, institutional trading and brokerage, payments that can move across stablecoins, tokenized deposits, and central-bank digital currencies, and tokenization of real-world assets and digital money.
DeFi appears in that story as a structural shift, not a niche product.
The May slides say on-chain protocols are reshaping lending and liquidity, and they chart DeFi total value locked rising from about $15 billion in 2020 to $53 billion in 2023 and $114 billion in 2025, with lending accounting for a growing share.
They also note large financial institutions extending into access and distribution, including BlackRock’s Bitcoin ETF and the integration of its BUIDL tokenized treasury fund into Uniswap for distribution and trading.
A separate chart, sourced in part to the bank’s DeFi research, projects tokenized real-world assets scaling toward systemic size by 2028, split across listed equities, money market funds, other funds, and remaining categories.
The research desk is one piece of a wider access stack.
Custody of tokenized securities and crypto runs through Financing and Securities Services and Zodia Custody.
Execution includes an institutional corporate and investment banking trading desk live since July 2025, plus Zodia Markets brokerage.
Tokenization is tied to the bank’s platform and to Libeara. Stablecoin access is routed through Anchorpoint.
The stated aim is to let clients access, transact, and hold digital assets inside a bank, and to turn those relationships into a larger share of client activity.
The commercial logic is explicit.
Standard Chartered presents itself as a network-agnostic “super-connector” across public, permissioned, private, and central-bank digital-currency rails.
It says the strategy defends core banking revenue, opens new market access, and supports client acquisition and cross-sell.
In that design, an institutional research ecosystem for DeFi is not an academic overlay. It is part of the machinery meant to make on-chain markets legible to clients who already expect models, risk metrics, and comparable coverage before they allocate.