Standard Chartered Predicts $2 Trillion DeFi Surge | US Crypto News

Welcome to the US Crypto News Morning Briefing—your essential rundown of the most important developments in crypto for the day ahead.

Grab a coffee for Standard Chartered’s latest outlook, suggesting stablecoins have done more than disrupt TradFi, quietly setting the stage for a $2 trillion DeFi revolution.

Crypto News of the Day: Stablecoins Pave the Way for DeFi’s Next Trillion-Dollar Era, Standard Chartered Says

According to Geoff Kendrick, Head of FX and Digital Assets Research at Standard Chartered, the explosive growth of stablecoins in 2025 goes beyond reshaping traditional finance (TradFi). It also set the foundation for a new era of decentralized finance (DeFi).

In a new note shared with clients, Kendrick said the widespread success of stablecoins this year has begun to “disrupt TradFi payment networks and savings,” while triggering three key preconditions for a sustained DeFi boom.

“The success of stablecoins in 2025 has started to disrupt TradFi payment networks and savings. It has also set three important DeFi boom preconditions in motion — raised awareness in developed markets, created the necessary liquidity on-chain, and driven an expansion of on-chain lending and borrowing,” Kendrick wrote.

Kendrick believes this convergence between stablecoins and DeFi will ignite massive growth in tokenized real-world assets (RWAs), a sector he expects to expand from $35 billion today to $2 trillion by the end of 2028.

This prediction aligns with forecasts from the Treasury Borrowing Advisory Committee (TBAC) as reported in a recent US Crypto News publication.

The projection also aligns with his previous forecast for the stablecoin market cap, suggesting that institutional adoption of on-chain assets could mirror the pace of stablecoin integration into the global financial system.

“Specifically, I think stablecoins will go from $230 billion to $2 trillion by the end of 2028. That growth will require an extra $1.6 trillion of US T-bills to be held as reserves, and that is all of the planned new T-bill issuance over that period,” Kendrick told BeInCrypto recently.

Ethereum Emerges as the Bridge Between TradFi and DeFi

The shift comes as Ethereum, which dominates DeFi by total value locked, strengthens its appeal to institutions.

On Wednesday, the Ethereum Foundation launched a new Institutional Use Case page designed to explain DeFi infrastructure and value propositions to traditional finance players.

Kendrick said the move reflects Ethereum’s growing role as the backbone of global digital finance.

“TradFi is turning to Ethereum, which dominates the DeFi space. Key DeFi protocols like Aave are going to be the winners. The future of finance is now,” he said.

Standard Chartered has been one of the few major banks that are consistently bullish on digital asset integration. The firm has previously forecast Bitcoin reaching new highs amid global liquidity shifts and regulatory normalization.

Kendrick’s latest note extends that optimism to DeFi, positioning it as the next frontier of institutional blockchain adoption.

If his projections hold, traditional financial institutions could, in the coming years, go beyond experimenting with DeFi to start relying on it as a core part of the global economic architecture.