Standard Chartered has initiated coverage of Sky’s SKY token with one of the most bullish institutional forecasts currently attached to a DeFi asset.
The bank expects SKY to reach $0.325 by the end of 2028, roughly five times the $0.065 level cited in its Sept. 11 research note. Geoff Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, described Sky: the protocol formerly known as MakerDAO, as something resembling “DeFi’s federal bank.”
The comparison comes from Sky’s role issuing USDS and DAI, setting governance rules and lending capital to ecosystem participants at wholesale rates.
More importantly for the price target, Standard Chartered believes the amount of value flowing back to SKY holders through staking rewards and token buybacks could increase fivefold by 2028.
$17.5B Lending Capacity Is the Bigger Number
The most interesting part of Standard Chartered’s thesis is not the price target itself.
Sky’s three primary capital-allocation agents: Spark, Grove and Obexhave borrowed about $5.9 billion in USDS from the protocol. They currently have combined borrowing limits of roughly $17.5 billion, nearly three times existing usage.
That unused capacity gives Sky a substantial potential revenue lever.
The agents deploy USDS across crypto lending and real-world assets, then pay Sky a base interest rate currently around 3.8%. Spark allocates through protocols such as Aave and Morpho, while Grove provides exposure to assets linked to managers including BlackRock, Apollo and Janus Henderson.
If borrowing expands toward existing limits while spreads remain similar, Standard Chartered estimates Sky’s income could rise another two to three times.
The infrastructure behind that thesis grew out of MakerDAO’s transition into Sky and the USDS stablecoin, which replaced MKR with SKY as the ecosystem’s governance token.
Stablecoin Growth Drives the 5X Case
The second catalyst is Sky’s balance sheet.
The protocol currently has about $90 million in aggregate backstop capital, a reserve buffer funded partly from income. Kendrick estimates that could reach approximately $150 million within eight months. Once the buffer reaches sufficient size, more income could potentially be redirected toward SKY staking rewards and buybacks.
Standard Chartered assumes SKY’s staking yield remains near its current 4.2% level.
Sky is also benefiting from the broader expansion of yield-bearing stablecoins. Its sUSDS product has around $4.5 billion in total value locked and yields about 3.6%, while USDS itself has expanded across networks including Solana.
Standard Chartered Says SKY Could Beat Bitcoin
The bank’s forecast also makes a striking relative-value call.
Kendrick said the $0.325 target implies SKY could roughly match Ethereum’s gains and outperform Bitcoin through the end of 2028. Standard Chartered separately forecasts ETH at $18,000 and BTC at $300,000 by then.
The main risk is straightforward: yield-bearing stablecoin adoption may grow more slowly than expected.
Standard Chartered still sees the overall stablecoin market reaching $2 trillion by 2028, but the bank is less certain about how much of that demand will flow into yield-bearing products such as USDS and Ethena’s USDe.
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