Standard Chartered predicts that the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector will enter a strong growth phase in the coming years, with the value of tokenized assets used in DeFi potentially reaching around $2.7 trillion by 2030, equivalent to an increase of about 37 times from the current level.

🔷 The growth momentum comes from real assets and traditional capital flows

According to Geoff Kendrick, Head of Digital Asset Research at Standard Chartered, this boom will be driven by two main trends:

Real-world assets are increasingly being tokenized and incorporated into lending protocols, trading, and liquidity provision on the blockchain. Traditional crypto assets are being more deeply integrated into the DeFi ecosystem.

Currently, only about 3% of stablecoins and around 10% of tokenized RWA are actually being utilized in DeFi. Standard Chartered expects this percentage to rise to about 30% by 2030.

🔶 Tokenization does not equate to liquidity

However, the report also emphasizes that tokenizing assets does not automatically solve the liquidity problem.

Many industry experts warn that if the same asset is issued on multiple different blockchains, the market could become fragmented, leading to price discrepancies, diluted liquidity, and higher transaction costs.

This means that to reach a scale of $2.7 trillion, the market needs not only more tokenized assets but also improvements in trading infrastructure, market-making mechanisms, custody, and regulatory frameworks.

🔷 DeFi could become the new financial infrastructure

Standard Chartered also assesses that major decentralized exchanges like Uniswap have the potential to become liquidity hubs for the tokenized asset market due to their scale, reliability, and long operational history.

Overall, the report shows that the trend of tokenization is opening up significant growth opportunities for DeFi. However, the key to success will not lie in the number of assets brought onto the blockchain, but in the ability to build an ecosystem with deep liquidity, high connectivity, and enough appeal to attract capital flows from traditional financial institutions.