Standard Chartered’s ARB $10 Call Sparks Same-Session Rally

Standard Chartered initiated coverage of Arbitrum’s ARB token on Sept. 15 with a $10 price target for the end of 2030. The bank published intermediate targets of $0.50 for 2026, $1.50 for 2027, $3.50 for 2028 and $6.50 for 2029. The note reached public feeds at 7:50 a.m. ET when ARB traded near $0.13.

On the publication day ARB gained as much as 9% in the same trading session. A same-session snapshot shows ARB up 5.77% while Bitcoin fell 3.91%, Ethereum fell 5.74% and an equal-weighted basket of rival layer-2 tokens (OP, STRK, MANTA and ZK) fell 7.45%. Those differences equal abnormal session returns for ARB of roughly 9.7 percentage points versus Bitcoin, 11.5 points versus Ethereum and 13.2 points versus the L2 peer basket.

The bank’s valuation rests on Arbitrum serving as infrastructure for tokenized traditional finance. The note describes the Arbitrum Expansion Program, under which chains built on the Arbitrum stack remit 10% of net protocol revenue back to Arbitrum, and cites Robinhood Chain as an example. Standard Chartered projects tokenized assets could reach $4 trillion by the end of 2028, compared with about $340 billion at present.

Protocol financial and activity data cited in the note include $6.19 million of reported income in the first half of 2026 with gross margins above 97% and more than $70 billion in average monthly stablecoin transfers. After Robinhood Chain launched in July, users generated a record $3.75 million in fees on Sept. 1. The Arbitrum Expansion Program contributed $360,000 in licensing fees in July.

The note states that ARB token holders currently have no direct claim on network revenue. The bank’s price path assumes some future governance change or buyback mechanism to connect token value to protocol cash flows.

Standard Chartered has published initiation notes on other tokens in recent months. Around the bank’s August initiation, Uniswap’s UNI rose about 22.5% in the same period, MORPHO increased more than 13% and AAVE added about 5.6%, while LINK fell approximately 0.8% around its initiation.

Market moves on Sept. 15 coincided with a Senate procedural vote that failed to advance the CLARITY Act on a 49-50 tally and broader weakness in major tokens. The note and the session price data provide a single-day data point linking a bank initiation, ARB price targets and same-session trading results.