Aave logged its largest single-day wallet growth in nearly five years, with 1,806 new addresses created on Ethereum on June 30, according to on-chain analytics firm Santiment.
The surge lines up with a $3,500 price target on Aave (AAVE) from Standard Chartered, a bank that has repeatedly cut its own Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) forecasts this year.
A Familiar Pattern of Forecasts
Standard Chartered initiated coverage of AAVE with a target implying nearly 50 times upside by 2030, built on an Aave $3,500 forecast tied to tokenized assets flooding decentralized finance (DeFi). The bank made a similar call on Uniswap (UNI) weeks earlier, and that forecast also triggered a jump in Uniswap network activity before it cooled off.
The same research desk cut its 2026 Bitcoin target from $150,000 to $100,000 and slashed its Ethereum price target 47%, from $7,500 to $4,000, within the same three-month stretch.
“We forecast significant upside for digital asset token prices into year-end, and we think Aave has moved beyond the April incident.”
Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered
That April incident was the KelpDAO exploit, which drained roughly $292 million and fed a KelpDAO exploit fallout that briefly cut Aave’s deposits nearly in half. Aave has since restarted its AAVE buyback program under Aavenomics 3.0, confirmed by founder Stani Kulechov, adding a direct revenue-to-token mechanism behind the current move.
Whether new wallets convert into deposits and borrowing, rather than short-lived attention, will decide if Aave’s growth outlasts Standard Chartered’s own forecasting record.
Bitrue