British banking giant Standard Chartered has issued a bullish long-term forecast for Solana (SOL), predicting the asset could reach $2,000 by 2030. The bank's head of cryptocurrency research, Geoffrey Kendrick, revised his short-term price target for SOL down to $250 from $310 by the end of 2026, acknowledging its recent plunge to the $100 level. However, he remains highly optimistic about its long-term trajectory, projecting prices of $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028, and $1,200 in 2029.
The bank's report argues that Solana is moving beyond its reputation as a "one-trick pony" or "number one memecoin network." While nearly half of its protocol fees in 2025 came from memecoin trading on decentralized exchanges, data now shows a significant shift in trading flows from meme tokens to SOL-stablecoin pairs. This indicates the emergence of new, more substantive use cases.
A key driver of this transformation is Solana's growing dominance in stablecoin transactions. The report notes that stablecoin turnover on Solana now significantly outpaces that on the Ethereum network, pointing to a different kind of activity: high-frequency, low-cost micropayments. This positions Solana as a potential backend for next-generation internet services, such as machine-to-machine payments and social apps with pay-per-use features, which are often unviable in traditional finance due to fixed per-transaction fees.
Coinbase's x402 platform, which facilitates AI-driven micropayments using stablecoins with an average transaction of just six cents, is cited as a prime example. While Coinbase's own Ethereum Layer-2 network, Base, has handled most of the volume so far, Kendrick suggests Solana's lower gas fees—often less than a cent—make it better suited for such applications in the long term.
The report also highlights growing institutional interest. Since October 2025, the Bitwise BSOL ETF has absorbed 78% of all net inflows into SOL-related ETFs, bringing over 1% of SOL's total supply under ETF management. Additionally, digital asset treasuries now hold nearly 3% of the total SOL supply.
