Invest1 publisher2 min readPublished
Standard Chartered puts a DeFi research desk beside its ETF and stablecoin access
Standard Chartered has placed a dedicated DeFi research desk beside its ETF and stablecoin access, citing DeFi value locked that reached $114bn in 2025. The move makes on-chain research part of the access layer the bank sells, grouped with the custody and trading it already offers.
The Investor · Invest desk
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What happened
- The bank frames the push as a three-stage path: exploring crypto from 2016 to 2021, building institutional foundations through 2025, and scaling custody, trading, payments and tokenization from 2026.
- Execution already runs through an institutional corporate and investment banking trading desk that went live in July 2025, alongside the Zodia Markets brokerage.
- Custody of both tokenized securities and crypto sits inside Financing and Securities Services and the Zodia Custody venture.
- Standard Chartered casts itself as a network-agnostic 'super-connector' spanning public, permissioned, private and central-bank digital-currency rails.
- The slides point to BlackRock's Bitcoin ETF and the move of its BUIDL tokenized treasury fund onto Uniswap as proof that large institutions are pushing into distribution.
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Why it matters
- decision Seating research beside execution commits Standard Chartered to covering lending protocols it does not operate, with the models and risk metrics clients expect before they allocate.
- exposure Shareholders cannot size the return, because the bank frames the strategy as defending core revenue and winning cross-sell but quantifies neither.
- precedent A tier-one bank shipping DeFi coverage inside client access raises the bar for peers to pair research with custody and trading.
Standard Chartered lists three benefits for the strategy and quantifies none of them: protecting its core banking revenue, giving it a way into new markets, and helping it win clients and sell more to the ones it has [11].
The figures the deck does carry are market-wide, and the bank reports no slice of them as its own. The May slides put DeFi total value locked at about $15 billion in 2020, $53 billion in 2023 and $114 billion in 2025, with lending taking a growing share [4]. The 2025 figure is roughly 7.6 times the 2020 level [1] and about 2.2 times the level two years earlier [2].
One chart points back at the bank itself. The bank is citing its own research as evidence for the market its research desk is meant to explain [1]. A projection has tokenized real-world assets growing to systemic scale by 2028, with the total divided among listed stocks, money market funds, other funds and a remainder. It is sourced in part to Standard Chartered's own DeFi research [6]. The slides also name an internal "DeFi 101" note behind the same tokenized-asset numbers [3].
Tokenization runs through the bank's platform and Libeara, and stablecoin access through Anchorpoint [9]. The stated aim of the whole stack is for clients to reach, trade and keep digital assets within a bank, and for the bank to use those relationships to capture more of what those clients do [13]. The straightforward reading is that seating research next to execution concedes something about how institutions buy. They will not allocate to on-chain lending without models, risk metrics and coverage like the kind they get on any listed sector. The counter is that nothing in the materials shows the bank earning from this market yet. A desk built as infrastructure could end up covering a sector that stays peripheral to it.
What to watch
- A disclosed revenue, fee or asset figure from the digital-asset franchise would test the claim that it defends core banking revenue.
- Flow or client numbers from the corporate and investment banking trading desk running since July 2025.
- Whether rival banks pair DeFi research with custody and execution.