Grayscale Values Aave at Up to $175 as TradFi Valuation Methods Come to DeFi

Grayscale Research has published a valuation of Aave using the kind of financial modelling more commonly applied to listed banks and fintech companies, concluding the protocol's native token is trading below fair value. The report, titled "A Guide to Buying the Dip: Valuing Crypto Using Cash Flows," estimates AAVE's current fair value at $80 to $100 and places a one-year base-case target of $175 on the token, conditional on regulatory clarity unlocking demand for tokenized real-world assets. AAVE was trading around $75 at the time of publication.

The analysis drew on discounted cash flow models, earnings multiples and comparisons with traditional lenders and fintech firms. Grayscale applied fintech price-to-earnings multiples of 20 to 25 times to its projected 2026 net income figure of roughly $60 million, producing a current fair value market cap of $1.2 to $1.5 billion. At the $175 target, the implied market cap would be roughly $2.7 billion, a scenario the report ties specifically to accelerated growth in tokenized asset adoption over the next twelve months.

Aave's Revenue Rose Sixfold in Two Years at a 50% Operating Margin

The underlying numbers Grayscale is working with are substantial for a DeFi protocol. Aave's revenue grew more than sixfold between 2023 and 2025, and Grayscale estimates the protocol is running at around a 50% operating margin, a figure that compares favourably with many traditional financial businesses. The protocol controls roughly 60% of the DeFi lending market, and monthly active users hit a record 155,000 earlier this year, supporting the argument that Aave's earnings base is durable rather than cyclical.

The report identifies three revenue drivers that could support future growth: core lending activity, the GHO stablecoin, and a suite of institutional products the protocol has been building. However, Grayscale also flagged structural limits on how much of that revenue flows to token holders. Fees are distributed to liquidity providers, used for operating costs or retained by the protocol's decentralised autonomous organisation, and token holders do not hold legally enforceable claims equivalent to shareholders. The gap between protocol revenue and token value accrual is a key risk any investor applying equity frameworks to DeFi needs to account for.

CoinShares Puts HYPE at $147 by 2031 Using Protocol Buyback Yield

Grayscale is not the only firm taking this approach. CoinShares has published a comparable framework for Hyperliquid's HYPE token, built around seven projected revenue streams and a price-to-fees multiple analogous to a price-to-earnings ratio in equity analysis. The CoinShares report sets a base-case target of $147 for HYPE by 2031, representing annualised gains of around 25%, with a bear case of $8 and a bull case of $456.

CoinShares describes Hyperliquid as a cleaner case study in token-level value accrual than most DeFi protocols, because 99% of the platform's trading fees are routed to an Assistance Fund that buys back HYPE on the open market. The fund has purchased roughly 44.4 million tokens to date, worth approximately $2.2 billion at current prices, functioning similarly to a corporate share buyback but executed transparently on-chain. HYPE is currently trading around $73, near its all-time high.

For Ethereum, CoinShares applied a sum-of-the-parts methodology combining projected cash flows with the token's monetary and collateral premium, arriving at a 2031 base-case valuation of $4,935. Most of the ETH figure comes not from fee income but from its role as collateral across DeFi and the broader ecosystem, which makes it a less direct example of the cash flow analysis Grayscale applied to Aave.

Standard Chartered Forecasts $2.7 Trillion in DeFi Assets by 2030

The institutional appetite for applying traditional valuation frameworks to DeFi sits within a broader forecast of sector growth. Standard Chartered has projected that tokenized real-world assets could lift total DeFi assets under management to $2.7 trillion by 2030, with Uniswap identified as a likely beneficiary as traditional finance partnerships bring more institutional activity on-chain. Grayscale's own report named Uniswap, alongside Sky and Maple, as other protocols exhibiting relatively high investment value under cash flow-based analysis, suggesting the firm sees the addressable universe of DCF-ready DeFi assets as wider than just Aave.

The broader significance of this reporting is methodological rather than price-specific. Institutional asset managers are now producing formal research that treats DeFi tokens as income-generating assets to be valued like fintech companies, rather than as speculative vehicles with no fundamental anchor. Whether those valuations hold depends on how token economics develop, how regulation shapes fee distribution, and how much of the projected growth in tokenized finance actually materialises, but the analytical infrastructure that institutions need to make those calls is being built in public.