Morning Crypto Market Overview: Standard Chartered believes in UNI, decentralized AI is on the rise, and Pudgy Party is shutting down
The digital asset market starts the day with a slight decline, but attention is focused on individual stories that could set trends for the week ahead. Let's break down the key events that shaped the morning agenda on June 16.
Standard Chartered bets on Uniswap
British banking giant Standard Chartered has published its first analytical report on the Uniswap protocol, and the forecast looks extremely ambitious. The bank's analysts expect the UNI token to grow 40-fold — from the current $2.70 to $100 by the end of 2030. The key driver is the explosive growth of tokenized real-world assets (RWA) in DeFi. According to the bank's estimates, the volume of such assets could increase 37-fold, directly impacting the liquidity of Uniswap pools. Geoffrey Kendrick, head of research, compared Uniswap to YouTube and Coinbase to Netflix, emphasizing that Uniswap's open infrastructure allows anyone to create liquidity pools, lowering barriers to entry. An additional catalyst is the UNIfication upgrade, which launched a token burning mechanism — the UNI supply has already decreased from 1 billion to 895 million.
Grayscale: Anthropic restrictions — an argument for decentralized AI
The situation surrounding Anthropic has become a powerful catalyst for the decentralized artificial intelligence sector. After the U.S. government ordered the company to restrict access to the Fable 5 and Mythos 5 models for foreign users on national security grounds, Anthropic even disabled them for everyone. Grayscale analysts, led by Zach Pandl, called this a stark demonstration of the risks of centralized control over advanced AI technologies. The market reaction was swift: the TAO token of the Bittensor project, which Pandl calls "bitcoin for AI," surged 30% in 12 hours, reaching a three-week high of $283.
Pudgy Penguins shuts down mobile game and focuses on browser
Iconic NFT project Pudgy Penguins has announced the closure of its mobile game Pudgy Party and the cessation of its development. Despite the game, launched in August 2025, accumulating over 1 million downloads, the team decided to reallocate resources to the browser-based project Pudgy World. This decision reflects the general challenges of Web3 games: finding a sustainable business model in crypto gaming has so far eluded many. Earlier, the Fishing Frenzy project also announced its closure. The NFT market, although having recovered to $1.5 billion, is still far from its 2022 peak of $17 billion.
Market dynamics and top movers
At the time of writing this review, Bitcoin (BTC) is trading around $65,828, having updated its daily low at $65,468 and high at $67,248. Ethereum (ETH) is also showing a decline, sitting at $1,763. Among the daily gainers, Hyperliquid stands out (+6.20%), while in the top 100, Jito has the best result (+27.32%). The weekly growth record belongs to SKYAI (+62.53%). Among the laggards are Dogecoin (-1.96% daily) and Audiera (-27.88% in 24 hours).
My expert commentary: Standard Chartered's forecast for UNI at $100 by 2030 is not just a number, but a signal that traditional finance is beginning to seriously consider DeFi protocols as key infrastructure for the future capital market. However, investors should remember that competition from niche DEXs and the need for deep integration with TradFi remain significant risks. As for the situation with Anthropic and the rise of TAO — this is a classic example of how regulatory risks in centralized systems can unexpectedly become a powerful driver for decentralized alternatives.