Could Solana Reach $3,211 by 2030?

Key Points

• One asset manager published a very bullish forecast for Solana a couple of years ago.

• The crypto's technology is sufficient to deliver on what's needed for the forecast to come true.

• Financial institutions are an important part of the picture here.

• 10 stocks we like better than Solana ›

Price targets are like weather forecasts in the sense that you probably shouldn't plan a beach wedding around them, but it's wise to bring an umbrella if they all point to rain.

The same goes for cryptocurrencies. Targets are not destiny, but it's worth knowing them because they tell you what the professionals are anticipating and where capital might flow if the picture keeps improving.

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On that note, the asset manager VanEck's valuation framework developed in late 2023 lays out a bullish scenario in which Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) reaches $3,211 by 2030. Is this a realistic assessment? Let's dig in and check it out.

Image source: Getty Images.

What would need to go right to reach the target

Let's start by anchoring the discussion in today's reality. As of this writing, Solana trades for about $220, so the VanEck bull path implies a gain of about 14.5-fold from here.

Today, Solana's market cap is roughly $119 billion. At Van Eck's bull-case price target, it would need a market cap of about $1.7 trillion -- a very high figure to be sure, but not inherently impossible under ideal conditions. For what it's worth, as of early this year, the asset manager saw the coin's price reaching $520 by the end of 2025, so even its base case for the near term is very bullish.

There are, to be sure, a handful of compelling reasons to believe that Solana will gain a tremendous amount of value. Financial institutions have started laying the rails that make big price targets thinkable rather than laughable.

The CME Group exchange has been expanding Solana financial derivatives, and it most recently signaled plans to list options on Solana futures, a building block for risk management and broader participation. Separately, Franklin Templeton, an asset manager, filed for a spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF), which should make it even more accessible for retail and institutional investors.

These steps do not guarantee capital inflows on their own, but they reduce the reasons that keep some money managers on the sidelines.

Why else might asset managers look out to 2030 and plug in ambitious numbers? They likely see the chain's main strengths of high speed and low fees as being very valuable, and perhaps also difficult to replicate.

In short, Solana's core design aims at high throughput and low fees via a parallel execution model that processes many transactions at once. That architecture, coupled with local fee markets and priority fees, is purpose-built for consumer apps that cannot tolerate clogged pipes or volatile costs.

If the next wave of blockchain demand looks like payment processings, AI agents, gaming, access to physical infrastructure, adtech, or social media, the chain's design is aligned with exactly what those apps need. Its competitors are all some combination of slower, more expensive, more specialized, or simply too small to matter.

In other words, if the app ecosystem keeps developing very rapidly during the next few years, that activity should translate into fees that accrue to validators and stakers and can, in turn, support the coin's long-run value. Of course, to hit the VanEck bull target, Solana would still need to actually capture a very large portion of that demand, if it happens.

The path is probably too narrow

So, given the above, could Solana reach $3,211 by 2030?

There's a chance, but it would require broad consumer-app adoption, regulatory clarity that lets ETFs launch and scale, and more tools for use by financial institutions, at large scale. A beneficial cocktail of favorable macroeconomic conditions would likely be necessary as well.

Thus, even as someone who's very bullish on Solana, I am very doubtful that VanEck's price target will be reached within the next five years. There are simply too many things that need to consistently go right for it to be believable, and the competition, particularly Ethereum, will not be passive during that period. Extending the time frame out by another few years makes reaching the target look much more realistic.

Regardless, the smarter approach here is not to bemoan the coin's low chances of hitting an arbitrary target, but to track the inputs that make ambitious targets feasible. Keep an eye on the diversity of the chain's users, investors, developers, decentralized applications (dApps), and evidence that the chain's design is translating into sustained, paid activity.

If those boxes keep getting ticked, price targets will likely take care of themselves, and even if they don't, the coin's price will probably still rise.

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.