Solana Price Prediction by Standard Chartered

The bank's analysis frames Solana as a high-performance blockchain with unique strengths — but also significant short-term challenges.

Standard Chartered Initiates Coverage on Solana with Long-Term Bullish Outlook

Standard Chartered Bank has begun coverage of SOL with a long-term bullish outlook, projecting the token to rise from its current price of around $175 to $500 by 2029. However, the bank anticipates that Solana will likely underperform ETH in the near term due to its strong reliance on memecoin trading activity, which is expected to peak and decline in 2024.

Solana is recognized for its technological capabilities, enabling high volumes of transactions at low fees, a factor that has contributed to Solana’s dominance in the memecoin sector. However, Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, highlighted that this strength may not be a sustainable driver for the token’s price in the long run.

“Solana is a high-performance blockchain with unique strengths, such as its ability to process large volumes of transactions at low fees, which has made it the dominant chain for memecoins. But it also faces some significant short-term challenges. For instance, Solana’s primary use case currently appears to be memecoins, which are heavily traded on the chain. But this sector seems to have peaked and the market is already discounting future earnings from this trend.”

Moreover, while Solana is undervalued according to a market cap-to-GDP framework and its ecosystem is rapidly expanding, it is still largely concentrated in speculative trading, which is a major point of contention for Standard Chartered.

On the other hand, ETH continues to benefit from a broader and more sustainable ecosystem of applications, which ranges from DeFi to Web3. This factor is expected to support ETH in the near term, while SOL may encounter difficulties as the rapid growth of the memecoin sector is expected to slow down.

Despite this near-term bearish view, Standard Chartered remains optimistic about the long-term value of Solana. With time and further development of applications beyond the trading sector, the blockchain is poised to achieve significant price appreciation.