Standard Chartered pushes its $2T stablecoin target to 2030

Standard Chartered moved a date on its own tokenization map this week and left the destination alone. Speaking at the SALT Conference on Nov 3, Geoffrey Kendrick, the bank's global head of digital assets research, pushed the milestone for a $2 trillion stablecoin market from 2028 to 2030, according to Crypto Briefing's coverage of the talk. The other half of his framework, roughly $2 trillion in tokenized real-world assets, stayed where it was. He expects non-stablecoin assets onchain to grow 50-fold over the next two to three years.

The revision is the more interesting half. Ground News, aggregating the research, puts current stablecoin supply at around $309 billion, roughly flat for twelve months even as transfer volumes climbed. Crypto Briefing reports Kendrick's own baseline range at $300 to $320 billion for stablecoins against $35 to $40 billion for non-stablecoin RWAs as of mid-2026. Apply the 50x to that RWA base and the arithmetic lands between $1.75 trillion and $2 trillion, which is where the bank has wanted the tokenized asset market to be by the end of 2028 all along. The SALT comments sharpen an existing thesis rather than replacing it.

The math behind the target

TokenPost ran the ratio against the bank's own materials: Standard Chartered's May 2026 investor presentation showed $35 billion in tokenized RWAs for 2025 and $2 trillion for 2028, about 57 times. Its Nov 3 market snapshot put distributed RWA value, assets whose tokens actually move between holders, at $39.34 billion, with a much larger represented figure of $408.71 billion for assets that stay on the issuing platform. TokenPost is careful to note those categories are not like-for-like with the presentation's baseline, and that caution is fair. Still, the blunt version of the picture is this: the mobile part of the tokenized asset market has added a few billion dollars over the past year, and the bank's target needs it to add roughly two orders of magnitude over the next two.

Kendrick's reasoning for why that could happen is institutional migration rather than speculation. Current tokenized balances are tiny next to the traditional markets they copy, and his view is that bonds, funds and equities move onchain because banks and asset managers decide to run their products there. He named DeFi protocols as the connective tissue and the main beneficiaries, on the argument that composability lets a tokenized bond serve as loan collateral in one application and feed a yield product in another. Crypto Briefing notes the earlier research behind that position: the bank has expected lending activity to expand once US legislation like the GENIUS Act and the Clarity Act settles the regulatory ground.

Reading a forecast that just moved

I take the delay more seriously than the ramp. Stablecoins are the most product-market-fit thing crypto has produced, with real payment flows, a finished US regulatory framework under GENIUS, and bank adoption underway, and even that market has gone sideways near $300 billion for a year. Against that, a 50x in two to three years for tokenized RWAs reads less like a projection and more like the upper bound of what the category could absorb if banks, regulators and use cases all cooperate.

That is not the same as calling the thesis wrong. The direction has only gotten more consensus since October: DTCC switched on its tokenization service and a Societe Generale desk accepted tokenized Treasuries as collateral six days later. The plumbing being built by firms with $100 trillion of inventory is real regardless of what any model says about 2028. But Kendrick has now demonstrated he will move his own deadlines when the data disappoints, which cuts both ways. The stablecoin delay arrived because supply stalled. If tokenized RWA balances keep growing at their current pace through mid-2027, expect the $2 trillion date to start sliding too, quietly, in a research note nobody quotes.

The number to hold the bank to is unglamorous: distributed RWA value versus that $39.34 billion Nov 3 mark. The 50x starts from there, not from the depository's vaults.