Arbitrum’s ARB drops 29% from September peak, Standard Chartered sets $10 target
The banking giant's coverage initiation projects a roughly 70x return for ARB by 2030, but on-chain data tells a more complicated story.
Standard Chartered just put a $10 price target on Arbitrum’s ARB token, projecting a roughly 70-fold increase from its current price of around $0.14. The target date: end of 2030.
The coverage initiation landed on September 15, and ARB responded with single-day price gains between 12% and 17%. On-chain data from Santiment shows ARB has dropped 29% from its September peak, with active addresses declining since September 6 even as large transactions picked up during the sell-off.
The bull case in four stages
Standard Chartered laid out a staged roadmap: $0.50 by end of 2026, $1.50 by end of 2027, $3.50 by 2028, and $6.50 by 2029 before reaching the $10 target in 2030.
The thesis rests heavily on the Arbitrum Expansion Program, or AEP, which collects a 10% fee on net protocol revenue generated by external chains built on Arbitrum’s technology. That model got a significant boost in July 2026 when Robinhood launched its own chain using Arbitrum’s stack. Estimated September revenue for Arbitrum is roughly $5 million, which is more than five times what the network was pulling in before the Robinhood Chain went live.
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Standard Chartered expects ARB to outpace both Bitcoin and Ethereum in growth over this period.
On-chain signals paint a mixed picture
While large transactions for ARB increased during its price decline, active addresses have been falling since September 6. September 16 brought the unlock of 92.6 million ARB tokens, representing approximately 1.4% of circulating supply.
Arbitrum’s fundamentals beyond the price tag
The Layer 2 network processed 478 million transactions in the first half of 2026 alone, pushing its lifetime total to 2.7 billion. Arbitrum currently holds the top position among blockchains for deployed tokenized real-world assets.