Will a $10,000 Investment in Solana Turn Into $1 Million by 2035?

Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) has already delivered life-changing returns for its earliest believers, so it is only natural to wonder if the next decade could mint another round of crypto millionaires from the same coin. After all, anyone with $10,000 on hand today can picture a future self bragging about having turned it into a cool $1 million, as risky as such fantasies may be to achieve.

Before popping (or even buying) any champagne, it pays to run the numbers, and to ask if Solana's fundamentals can realistically support another 100-bagger move.

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The timeline is long and the fundamentals are strong, but...

Solana is a good chain that's among the strongest in the crypto sector from the standpoints of technical implementation and user-friendliness. Its price is up about 260% during the past three years.

But turning $10,000 into $1 million in 10 years would require Solana to compound at an annual rate of roughly 58%. That implies a 100-fold rise in the token's price from about $144 today to around $14,400 by 2035.

Meanwhile, the network's market cap would balloon from roughly $77 billion to about $7.7 trillion, making it considerably larger than the entire 2024 gross domestic product of Japan, at about $4.2 trillion. Such gargantuan growth is not impossible. For instance, Bitcoin rose even faster between 2013 and 2023, but every additional zero added to the market cap gets harder because new money must justify ever-steeper valuations.

Image source: Getty Images.

For Solana to shoulder that load it would need to become the default payment or transaction settlement layer for a meaningful slice of global finance, not just an efficient chain for non-fungible tokens (NFTs), decentralized finance (DeFi), meme coins, and hobbyist projects. Think trillions of dollars of tokenized stocks, bonds, and real-world assets (RWAs) coursing over its rails and paying fees in Solana.

Anything less, and a 100-bagger is mathematically out of reach.

The tailwinds here are still strong enough for a serious rally

There is nothing inherently unreachable about Solana's grand vision being realized during the coming decade. In fact, Solana would be a logical place for those kinds of financial activities due to its speed, low fees, and great developer tooling.

To its credit, Solana is built for throughput. Its base layer was benchmarked in 2023 at 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), with median fees below $0.002. This year, the long-awaited Firedancer client entered validator testing, promising a theoretical ceiling of 1 million TPS that would dwarf rival chains as well as traditional payments networks utilized by major credit card providers. If Firedancer ships on schedule in late 2025, Solana could retain its cost and speed advantage for years.

Big finance is taking notice. In May a group of major banks announced pilot programs to issue and trade tokenized municipal bonds and money market funds directly on Solana. And, earlier this month the credit rater Moody's ran the first on-chain credit rating trial for those assets.

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) estimates the asset tokenization opportunity at $16 trillion by 2030. If Solana captures even a modest share, fee-driven demand for the coin could surge, and things look to be on track on that front.

Furthermore, developers are also experimenting with AI agents that settle micro-payments and data attestations on-chain, thanks to new toolkits released this year. These apps are early, but they offer a second leg of demand beyond finance. If agents end up taking off and transacting on Solana at scale, it could be a major driver of demand for the coin.

Keep your expectations in check

Despite the above, there's a very long way between where the coin is today and it rising 100-fold, and it does not make sense to bet on it delivering the astronomical returns needed to turn $10,000 into $1 million at this juncture.

A more grounded case is that Solana could rise five- to 10-fold during the next five years or so if Firedancer delivers, tokenization moves from trials to production, some institutions use it to process transactions, and artificial intelligence apps gain traction. A 10-fold jump would turn $10,000 into $100,000, and it would required a hefty but fully believable 26% annual return.

The move here is to build a position slowly, size it modestly, and revisit the investment thesis for continuing to buy it each time a major milestone lands. Owning some Solana will likely pay off handsomely, but counting on a $1 million payday is more hope than strategy.

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Bitcoin and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Moody's, and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.