• Standard Chartered's Geoffrey Kendrick expects Bitcoin (BTC) market share to decline gradually through 2030.
• Kendrick dates the shift from speculation to fee income to mid-2025, when stablecoins found real use.
• Kendrick expects the layer-2 market to concentrate on Arbitrum and Coinbase's Base network.
Standard Chartered's 2030 Call
Bitcoin (BTC) is set to cede part of its share of the overall crypto market, according to Geoffrey Kendrick, head of global digital assets research at Standard Chartered, who projects the erosion will unfold gradually through 2030. For a market long used to reading crypto through the Bitcoin price cycle, the call moves the scoreboard from price to fee income. Kendrick's argument runs as follows. For most of crypto's history, the altcoin market traded on speculation alone, and that began to change in mid-2025, when stablecoins found genuine use. Stablecoins, blockchain dollar tokens distinct from any Central Bank Digital Currency, now carry real payment activity, and the protocols beneath them collect fees from usage rather than from hype. Asset tokenization, the representation of real-world assets such as funds on a blockchain, compounds the effect: as tokenization scales, a set of altcoins turns into operating businesses whose fees grow continuously while their token prices stay low. Bitcoin still commands the headlines, but Kendrick locates the larger story beneath the surface, and he implies the wider Bitcoin market will feel the shift first as a slow dilution rather than a sudden shock. The revenue he describes is not hypothetical: protocols are already booking fees from actual on-chain activity. On the supply side of the thesis, he expects the layer-2 market, where transactions are processed off the base chain at lower cost, to concentrate around Arbitrum and Coinbase's Base network. Base issues no token of its own, which leaves Arbitrum as the principal vehicle for capturing that growth. Robinhood already builds on Arbitrum technology, and Kendrick expects more traditional firms to take the same path: one corporate client today could become four, five or as many as ten within a year, multiplying Arbitrum's fee income in step.
Arbitrum, Chainlink and the Fee Receipts
The picks extend the thesis beyond the rollup layer and map the plumbing of a tokenized market; Kendrick presents them as one position built on fee growth rather than five separate bets. Chainlink, which moves real-world data on-chain and connects separate blockchain networks to institutional standards, is his trust layer: when banks and asset managers migrate holdings on-chain, “they want to be able to trust what is happening,” a formulation he presents as the simple, clear case for LINK. The standard he invokes is institutional: data feeds and cross-chain links must work at the level banks and asset managers require before they commit balance sheets. Uniswap supplies the clearest evidence that the fee mechanics are already live. Activity on Robinhood Chain has driven a sharp rise in Uniswap buybacks and burns, a mechanism that uses protocol revenue to repurchase tokens and remove them from circulation permanently. The pace, in his telling, has outrun his own anticipation, and the project has already passed his earlier expectations. Lending follows the same pattern: AAVE and MORPHO, in his assessment, are pioneering decentralized lending, a market that expands with each new class of real-world assets that settles on-chain. Ethereum (ETH) sits at the center of the thesis. Kendrick expects most stablecoin and tokenization activity to take place on Ethereum, and he expects the Ethereum ecosystem to capture enough of that growth for ETH to outperform Bitcoin, with price leadership following the chain where the activity lives. The historical frame he offers is Amazon in 1997, a company that looked to nearly everyone like a “crazy online bookstore” at the time; he thinks some of today's protocols will be judged the same way in hindsight. His closing line attaches a number to the regret he expects: “Ten years from now, people will sigh and say: God, I wish I had bought Arbitrum at 21 cents.”
Bitcoin's Share as the Starting Line
The claim is a dominance call, and dominance calls are only as large as the baseline they start from. Kendrick fixes the horizon at 2030 and the mechanism, fee compounding on smart-contract platforms, but attaches no current market-share baseline, so the distance Bitcoin must travel cannot yet be measured. Fee growth on Arbitrum or Ethereum does not by itself force capital out of Bitcoin; the call is a bet against Bitcoin maximalism, the view that Bitcoin absorbs the market's value, and Kendrick's own wording keeps it gradual. Bitcoin monetizes its base layer through block space and issuance that halves at every Bitcoin halving, while the fee engine he describes runs on smart-contract chains; even Bitcoin DeFi stays small next to the lending volumes he cites. Whether the rotation reaches price is our Bitcoin technical analysis desk's question. Against that missing baseline, the 2030 target stands as a direction, not a measured distance.
