Standard Chartered is building an institutional research universe for DeFi

Seven DeFi and onchain infrastructure initiations in little more than three months show crypto research moving beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum toward the kind of sector-level analysis institutions use to compare businesses, risks and returns.

Ethena is the seventh DeFi or onchain infrastructure project Standard Chartered has initiated coverage on since mid-June, following Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Chainlink, Sky and Arbitrum. The reports span decentralized trading, lending, stablecoin issuance, data infrastructure and blockchain execution, with individual models for revenue, usage, token economics and valuation.

Crypto Briefing has covered the individual calls as they arrived, including Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Chainlink, Sky and Arbitrum. The Ethena initiation adds another token target. The emerging coverage universe is the more interesting signal.

Institutional markets require more than custody and execution. Portfolio managers need frameworks for deciding what an asset is worth, risk committees need metrics they can interrogate, and investment committees need a basis for comparing one exposure with another. Research is part of that infrastructure.

Standard Chartered makes that connection explicitly. In a May investor presentation, the bank placed its dedicated digital-assets research desk under the “access” portion of its digital-asset strategy, alongside custody, institutional trading, tokenization and collateral services. The bank described those capabilities as part of a broader effort to give clients access to digital assets inside a bank-grade framework. That combination represents a very different stage of institutionalization from publishing another Bitcoin forecast.

Crypto research is moving down the stack

Standard Chartered began formal crypto research coverage in September 2021 with Bitcoin and Ethereum. At the time, the bank said the research was intended to help clients investing in or trading digital assets and navigating decentralized finance.

It subsequently expanded into layer-one networks including Avalanche and Solana. This year’s protocol initiations go further down the stack. Instead of asking primarily what a blockchain or crypto asset might be worth, Standard Chartered is attempting to model the economics of specific financial applications running onchain.

The distinction matters because the questions are changing. The Uniswap model is tied to trading and liquidity. Aave and Morpho are analyzed through lending volumes, deposits and revenue. Chainlink is treated as infrastructure whose economics depend on data, interoperability and institutional tokenization. Standard Chartered’s Arbitrum analysis focuses partly on fees generated by external chains using its technology. Sky is examined as a stablecoin issuer and wholesale provider of capital. Ethena introduces another model built around stablecoin growth, yield generation and token buybacks.

Those are increasingly recognizable financial questions: how much business is being done, how defensible that business is, where revenue comes from and whether any of the economics reach the token holder.

For much of crypto’s history, valuation has been dominated by network effects, narrative, token supply and comparisons with other tokens. Institutional research imposes a less forgiving framework that places more weight on revenue quality, dilution, competitive position, governance, concentration, legal rights and the mechanism connecting network usage with token ownership.

Protocols that want institutional capital will increasingly have to answer those questions.

The bank is building the rails as well as researching them

Standard Chartered’s research expansion also sits inside a much broader commercial push into digital assets.

The bank launched deliverable institutional Bitcoin and Ether spot trading through its UK branch in July 2025 and expanded the service into the UAE in September 2026. It offers digital-asset custody, has worked with BlackRock and OKX on using tokenized money-market assets as collateral, and in July completed live digital-asset prime-brokerage transactions with LMAX Group.

Its May investor presentation describes digital assets as a business that can deepen client relationships and increase the bank’s share of their financial activity. Standard Chartered identifies custody, execution, tokenization, interoperability and research as parts of that strategy rather than isolated experiments.

That commercial interest is important context. Standard Chartered is hardly a neutral observer waiting to see whether digital assets succeed. It has businesses positioned to benefit if institutions trade, custody, finance and tokenize more assets.

That commercial context also makes the research push more relevant because banks build coverage where they expect clients to have questions and eventually deploy capital. The existence of a dedicated analyst model does not prove that institutional investors are buying a token, but it reduces one of the frictions between a new market and traditional capital: the absence of familiar analytical infrastructure.

The institutional map still runs through Ethereum

Standard Chartered’s new protocol universe has a clear center of gravity. Uniswap, Aave, Morpho, Sky and Ethena all grew out of Ethereum’s DeFi market, while Arbitrum extends Ethereum’s execution layer. Chainlink is multi-chain, though its oracles became core infrastructure for Ethereum lending and derivatives. Taken together, the seven initiations map the part of DeFi that institutional analysts already know how to navigate.

The bank’s protocol calls lean on a common growth story. Standard Chartered expects tokenized assets to reach about $4 trillion by the end of 2028, with a growing share eventually becoming active inside DeFi. If that migration happens mainly through Ethereum and its rollups, the projects in its coverage universe are plausible places for the activity to land. The concentration is understandable, although it also leaves several valuations tied to the same institutional adoption path.

Ethereum’s longer operating history and institutional infrastructure help explain why Standard Chartered’s protocol coverage starts there. The network has the deepest pools of collateral and stablecoins, along with established custodians, auditors, oracle providers and counterparties. Much of the tokenization work pursued by banks and asset managers was also built on Ethereum, while Standard Chartered began its own spot trading service with Bitcoin and Ether and has covered both assets since 2021. The capital gap remains large: on DefiLlama’s chain dashboard, Ethereum had about $53.1 billion in DeFi TVL and $146.6 billion in stablecoins, compared with $6.5 billion and $16.3 billion on Solana. Those balances have not prevented Solana from overtaking Ethereum on several activity measures during the same 24 hours, with about $2.53 billion in decentralized exchange volume against Ethereum’s $2.25 billion, 2.95 million active addresses against roughly 617,000, and $6.09 million in application revenue against $2.2 million. DefiLlama counts rollups separately, leaving Arbitrum and Base out of Ethereum’s totals; active-address figures represent wallets rather than individual users, and daily data moves with market conditions. Solana is generating comparable trading volume and more application activity with roughly one-eighth of Ethereum’s DeFi TVL, activity that Standard Chartered’s Ethereum-heavy protocol coverage does not yet capture.

Solana is the next test for institutional DeFi research

Standard Chartered has already identified the shift in its Solana research. The bank says Solana’s decentralized exchange flows are moving from memecoin trading toward stablecoin pairs and micropayments, with stablecoins turning over two to three times faster than on Ethereum. It has not extended that work into comparable coverage of Solana protocols, leaving its DeFi universe concentrated around Ethereum-adjacent projects as Solana gains trading volume, wallet activity and application revenue.

Institutional-grade research matters because it gives investment committees a shared basis for comparing revenue, dilution, governance, security and the relationship between protocol activity and token value, and that work is gaining momentum across traditional and crypto-native firms. Alongside Standard Chartered’s valuation models, Galaxy has published a DeFi risk-rating framework, Coinbase distributes market and tokenomics research to institutional clients, and Grayscale analyzes DeFi through its Financials sector. The result is a market that professional investors can compare on common terms, even when custody, financing and execution remain uneven.

Solana will show how quickly that research universe can adapt to the market it is meant to explain. The next evidence to watch is protocol-level coverage of the applications driving its stablecoin payments, trading volume and fee revenue, followed by the custody and financing support that would make those assets accessible to more institutions. If research remains concentrated around Ethereum while Solana continues to gain users, liquidity and revenue, the gap will show how far institutional underwriting trails onchain growth.

Disclosure: This article was edited by Mark Edward. For more information on how we create and review content, see our Editorial Policy.