What to know : Standard Chartered's Geoff Kendrick now sees Solana evolving from a memecoin-focused network into a backbone for stablecoin-based micropayments. Though trimming his 2026 forecast for SOL to $250, Kendrick sees the price hitting $2,000 by 2030. Hit particularly hard by crypto’s downturn, SOL has plunged about 60% since mid-September.
Solana's memecoin-driven reputation may soon give way to a deeper role in digital payments, according to a new report from Standard Chartered's head of crypto research, Kendrick Geoffrey.
Given SOL's recent plunge to the $100 level, Kendrick has cut his price forecast for SOL to $250 from $310 by the end of 2026. Kenrick, however, remains a bull, seeing a path to $2,000 by 2030, fueled by Solana's growing role in stablecoin-based micropayments.
The bank describes Solana as moving beyond its “one-trick pony” image. In 2025, nearly half of Solana’s protocol fees came from memecoin trading on decentralized exchanges. But data now shows a shift in trading flows — from meme tokens to SOL-stablecoin pairs — suggesting that new uses are emerging. Stablecoin turnover on Solana now significantly outpaces Ethereum , pointing to a different kind of activity: high-frequency, low-cost transactions.
One example is x402, a platform created by Coinbase (COIN) to support micro-sized, AI-driven payments using stablecoins. The average transaction on x402 is just six cents. Base, Coinbase’s own Layer 2 network on Ethereum, has hosted most of the volume so far, but its fees may be too high for long-term viability. Solana’s lower gas fees — often less than a cent — make it better suited for such applications, Geoffrey said.
Micropayments, often unviable in traditional finance due to fixed per-transaction fees, could unlock new types of internet services, from machine-to-machine payments to social apps with built-in pay-per-use features. Solana’s technical strengths position it to serve as the backend for this kind of infrastructure.
Standard Chartered also points to 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 the total supply under ETF management, according to Geoffrey. Meanwhile, digital asset treasuries now hold nearly 3% of SOL.
Kendrick's revised targets now project SOL at $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028 and $1,200 in 2029.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
