Standard Chartered Cuts Near-Term Solana Forecast, Sees $2,000 by Decade's End

By Vismaya V

Standard Chartered has slashed its 2026 Solana price target while raising long-term forecasts, saying the blockchain will dominate micropayments and stablecoin transactions as it moves beyond its meme coin-dominated past.

The international banking group cut its year-end SOL forecast to $250 from $310, but raised projections for subsequent years, estimating the token could reach $2,000 by end-2030, according to a research note from Global Head of Digital Assets Research Geoff Kendrick shared with Decrypt.

The revised outlook comes as Solana trades at $101, down 18% over the past week and over 48% year-to-date, according to CoinGecko data, a steep decline from its all-time high of $293 hit last January following the launch of President Donald Trump's Official Trump (TRUMP) meme coin on the network.

"Flows on Solana's decentralised exchanges are starting to shift from memecoins towards SOL-stablecoin pairs," Kendrick wrote in the note, adding that these stablecoins "are turning over two to three times faster than stablecoins on ETH, demonstrating a different use case."

The bank now forecasts that SOL will reach $400 by end-2027 (up from a prior $350 target), $700 by end-2028 (up from $475), and $1,200 by end-2029 (up from $500).

The new end-2030 target marks the first time Standard Chartered has published a Solana price projection that far out in its research coverage.

Kendrick explained that Solana's "ultra-low-cost, fast and reliable transaction model" positions it to dominate sectors requiring high-volume, low-transaction-cost solutions—particularly micropayments enabled by AI-driven protocols like x402, where average transaction sizes are just $0.06.

When asked what key indicators he will track to confirm that micropayments are becoming Solana’s next dominant use case, Kendrick told Decrypt he is watching two primary metrics: “Volume of stablecoin transfers on Solana” and “Velocity of stablecoins on Solana.”

With Solana's median gas fee at $0.0007 compared to Base's $0.015, the network can economically process transactions too small for traditional finance systems or even most other blockchains to handle profitably, the analyst said.

“AI-driven micropayments using stablecoins are starting to demonstrate that the ‘order of magnitude’ cost reduction on Solana can enable entirely new markets to develop,” Kendrick wrote in the note, but he cautioned that achieving scale in these emerging sectors “may take time.”

Solana's long-term forecast

Standard Chartered expects Solana to underperform Ethereum through 2027 before catching up as micropayment markets mature.

The analyst maintained the view that Solana will outperform Bitcoin throughout the forecast horizon through 2030, though the token faces a challenging near-term outlook as new use cases develop at scale.

The bank said 47% of Solana’s 2025 “GDP”—fees paid to on-chain apps—came from DEXs dominated by meme coin trading, but that share has been falling through 2025 after peaking around the Trump meme coin launch, citing Token Terminal data.

Kendrick noted that Solana is "no longer trading as cheap" on Standard Chartered's market cap-to-GDP valuation metric, which the bank likens to a price-to-earnings ratio for digital assets.

"We suspect this reflects the shift in Solana's DEX activity mix from a memecoin focus to SOL-stablecoin pairs," he wrote, adding that "if more SOL-stablecoin activity takes place on Solana via micropayments, this will result in a higher SOL price."

On Myriad, a prediction market owned by Decrypt’s parent company Dastan, users point to a greater than 90% chance that Solana does not reach a new price peak before July 1.

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