Standard Chartered sees $4 trillion in tokenized assets by 2028 — DeFi protocols first in line!

Standard Chartered is projecting $4 trillion in tokenized assets by end-2028, split evenly between stablecoins and real-world assets — a forecast that frames the next four years as a structural inflection point for on-chain finance. The bank's global Head of Digital Assets Research, Geoffrey Kendrick, named established DeFi protocols with strong risk metrics as the primary beneficiaries of that wave.

Kendrick flagged passage of the Clarity Act as a key near-term catalyst, suggesting the regulatory runway matters as much as the capital. A $2 trillion stablecoin market alongside $2 trillion in tokenized RWAs would represent a fundamental re-plumbing of how institutional liquidity moves — and the DeFi infrastructure already in place is positioned to capture the routing, settlement, and yield layers of that flow.