Arbitrum is suddenly getting the kind of Wall Street attention usually reserved for much larger blockchain networks. Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of ARB with a $10 price target for the end of 2030, arguing that Arbitrum could become a key piece of the infrastructure behind traditional finance moving onto blockchains.
The thesis is less about what Arbitrum does today than what it could become. Standard Chartered analyst Geoff Kendrick describes it as “the blockchain for TradFi,” pointing to growing demand for tokenized stocks, stablecoins and real-world assets.
At around $0.137 on Tuesday, ARB would need to climb roughly 73 times to reach the bank’s long-term target. Standard Chartered’s path is deliberately gradual: $0.50 by the end of 2026, $1.50 in 2027, $3.50 in 2028, $6.50 in 2029 and $10 in 2030.
The bank had no previous ARB forecast, so all five targets are new. For context, its 2030 projections also put Bitcoin at $500,000 and Ether at $40,000.
Arbitrum is chasing the money behind the blockchain
The interesting part of the thesis is not the headline number. It is the business model.
Arbitrum currently generates revenue from several sources, including transaction fees on Arbitrum One, returns from treasury assets, Timeboost auctions and fees paid by other chains using Arbitrum’s technology.
That last category is becoming especially important.
Under the Arbitrum Expansion Program, chains that use its technology pay 10% of their net protocol revenue, with 8% going to the Arbitrum DAO and 2% to developers. Robinhood Chain, which launched July 1, is the most prominent example so far.
And Robinhood is already producing numbers that make Arbitrum One look surprisingly small by comparison.
According to DefiLlama data cited in the report, Robinhood Chain generated about $448,600 in fees over 24 hours and $37.3 million over 30 days. Arbitrum One brought in about $17,900 over 24 hours and $454,200 over 30 days.
That gap is the heart of Standard Chartered’s argument: Arbitrum may not need to capture all the activity itself if it can collect a cut from an expanding network of chains built on its technology.
The model still comes with an obvious complication. ARB is a governance token, and the fees currently flow into a DAO treasury rather than directly into the token. Standard Chartered explicitly notes that ARB “has no direct way of accruing such value at present.”
That makes the $10 thesis as much a bet on future token economics as it is on blockchain adoption.
Arbitrum’s Robinhood problem is also its biggest selling point
Robinhood Chain has made Arbitrum’s expansion strategy visible almost overnight, but the chain’s early fee numbers have been unusually volatile.
Robinhood Chain generated $6.04 million in fees on September 4 before revenue dropped 93% over the following sessions. The first 14 days of September produced $32.31 million in fees, while the most recent seven-day average fell to about $908,000 a day.
At that pace, September would finish around $47 million in fees rather than the $60 million monthly figure assumed in Standard Chartered’s revenue model.
The spike itself was also partly driven by a memecoin launchpad and a trading bot. Gas costs on the network jumped 82-fold over 11 days during the surge.
Standard Chartered’s report uses Token Terminal figures instead, citing daily fee revenue that “recently touched USD 8mn” and a September average of $2.8 million. The two platforms measure blockchain economics differently, making the exact number less important than the broader trend.
The bank estimates Arbitrum’s September revenue at roughly $5 million, more than five times its level before Robinhood Chain launched and above the previous monthly record of $4.4 million in October 2025.
Arbitrum also manages around $100 million in non-ARB assets through its treasury, according to the report. Roughly half is allocated to ETH and related derivatives, with the rest split between real-world assets and stablecoins. That portfolio currently generates about $200,000 to $250,000 a month in interest.
The tokenization bet behind the $10 forecast
Standard Chartered’s bullish case ultimately depends on a much bigger story: Wall Street putting more of its financial plumbing on blockchains.
The bank expects tokenized assets, including stablecoins and real-world assets, to grow from roughly $340 billion today to $4 trillion by the end of 2028. It also expects the share of those assets used in decentralized finance to reach 30% by 2030, compared with 3.5% today.
Tokenized equities are another major assumption. Standard Chartered forecasts that market to reach $750 billion by the end of 2028, up roughly 250 times from its current level.
The market is still tiny by comparison. Data from rwa.xyz cited in the report puts distributed tokenized stocks at about $2.92 billion, with Ondo, bStocks and Backed Finance’s xStocks among the largest issuers. Robinhood’s 189 tokenized assets represent about $152 million, with the bank estimating roughly $200 million in Robinhood stock tokens across Robinhood Chain and Arbitrum One.
For Arbitrum, that creates a potentially lucrative position: becoming the infrastructure underneath financial products that users barely think about as “crypto” at all.
The valuation argument reinforces that point. Standard Chartered says ARB trades at about 1.3 times annualized three-month ecosystem fees, compared with multiples as high as 25 times for Ethereum, Solana and Avalanche.
Its view is that investors are assigning a premium to layer-1 networks simply because they are layer 1s, while Arbitrum is being discounted for settling to Ethereum rather than securing its own base layer.
The bank expects that gap to narrow.
There are plenty of ways the thesis could break. Tokenization could grow more slowly than expected. Rival blockchains could win major financial institutions. ARB could continue accumulating ecosystem value without developing a direct mechanism to capture it.
Regulatory uncertainty also remains part of the equation, with the unpassed Clarity Act and forthcoming SEC guidance among the issues Standard Chartered highlights. The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation is also working on its own tokenization infrastructure, underlining how many possible winners are still competing for the same financial future.
For now, Arbitrum’s Robinhood experiment is giving the investment case something it previously lacked: measurable evidence that licensing blockchain infrastructure can generate meaningful revenue.
The harder question is whether that revenue will ever become something ARB holders can directly claim. Standard Chartered is betting that, as tokenized finance grows, it eventually will.
Rest assured, this content is strictly educational and does not constitute financial advice.