- Standard Chartered lowered its 2026 Solana target to $250 (down from $310) due to current market stress, but projected a long-term surge to $2,000 by 2030.
- The bank sees a shift from “memecoins to micropayments,” noting that Solana’s sub-cent fees and high speed make it the ideal rail for AI-driven, stablecoin-based transactions.
- Institutional adoption is growing, with the Bitwise BSOL ETF capturing 78% of all SOL ETF inflows since October 2025, now controlling over 1% of the total supply.
Solana’s (SOL) latest sell-off has not shaken Standard Chartered’s view that the network could become a core rail for small, dollar-linked payments rather than just a home for speculative memecoins.
After SOL dropped back toward about US$100 (AU$153), the bank’s head of crypto research, Geoffrey Kendrick, cut his end-2026 price target to US$250 (AU$382) from US$310 (AU$474).
But Kendrick still expects much higher levels over time, with updated targets of:
- US$400 (AU$612) in 2027
- US$700 (AU$1,071) in 2028
- US$1,200 (AU$1,836) in 2029
- And up to US$2,000 (AU$3,060) by 2030.
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Not Memecoins, But Spending
In 2025, nearly half of Solana’s protocol fees came from memecoin trading on decentralised exchanges. Kendrick says the bullish case is built less on memes and more on payments, as recent data shows activity shifting toward trading between SOL and stablecoins, and notes that stablecoin volumes on the Solana network now run ahead of Ethereum’s.
Standard Chartered mentioned x402 as an example, a platform built by Coinbase for tiny, AI-driven payments using stablecoins. The average payment there is around US$0.06 (AU$0.09). Most of the volume has run on Base, Coinbase’s layer 2, but Kendrick argues Base’s fees are still too high for long-term mass use.
Solana transactions often cost less than a cent, making it a better fit for machine-to-machine payments and pay-per-use features inside apps.
Standard Chartered also points to growing “sticky” ownership. Since October 2025, the Bitwise BSOL exchange-traded fund has taken in roughly 78% of net inflows to SOL-focused ETFs, bringing more than 1% of SOL’s total supply under ETF management. Digital-asset treasury portfolios now hold close to 3% of the supply.
In the bank’s view, those trends show Solana gradually moving away from a “one-trick pony” memecoin image and toward a role as infrastructure for cheap, stablecoin-based payments, even if its price path is bumpier in the short term than the bank previously expected.
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