Where Will Solana Be in 3 Years?

Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) developers gave themselves some homework in July 2025. The "Internet Capital Markets" plan targets a swath of features for the developer community to prepare by the end of 2027. Since then, the scope of those ambitions has expanded, even as the coin's price has fallen.

The main battle ahead is with Ethereum for the prize of being the leading tokenized asset management and trading venue. Let's map out how the next three years will determine the outcome of that competition.

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Solana is already a leader in tokenized assets

Solana passed 300,000 real-world asset holders (users holding tokenized stocks, bonds, or other traditional assets), more than any other chain. It handled more than 96% of tokenized equity spot trading volume in June. Ethereum still leads on total tradeable tokenized asset value, with $15.5 billion versus Solana's $3.3 billion, so the question is whether Solana can close that gap over the next few years.

Alpenglow, Solana's upcoming consensus overhaul, is intended to cut transaction finality time from about 12.8 seconds to roughly 150 milliseconds. It went live for testing in May with its debut on the mainnet due late this year, delayed from a Q1 launch target.

After it rolls out, the network will be able to process traffic in parallel rather than in series, and smart contracts will control transaction ordering. This is the right setup for its on-chain markets to rival centralized exchanges on speed, at least in theory.

The coming years aren't guaranteed to be good

Two active proposals known as Solana Improvement Documents (SIMDs) would make the coin substantially better as an investment, and both could be implemented in the next few years.

SIMD-0550 would accelerate the reduction in new SOL token issuance, cutting the rate by 30% per year instead of the current 15%. This means roughly 18.9 million fewer SOL tokens entering circulation. It's still inflation, but much slower. The effect would be for a permanently low and static supply inflation rate to occur sooner than is currently encoded into the protocol. The other proposal, SIMD-0553, would raise the daily token burn rate from about 648 SOL to somewhere between 7,500 and 9,000; that'd have the effect of adding a bit more pressure to the coin's supply, which could help to support higher prices over the long term. The more aggressive version of that proposal, SIMD-0228, failed to pass in March 2025, and both of these proposals might also fail.

The bull case is that Alpenglow delivers the desired performance improvements, SIMD-0550 passes its governance vote, and then the chain's tokenized asset markets capture a hearty slice of the tokenized stocks segment, as well as capturing some of the tokenized private credit and structured products segments. That scenario looks fairly likely right now.

The base case is that the SIMDs pass partially or in a diluted form and Solana's share of the tokenized stock segment grows a bit while Ethereum wins a big chunk of everything else. Solana would still be worth more than it is today by 2030.

The bear case is that both proposals fail, resulting in broader network governance issues that sap the confidence of financial institutions, making them eschew onboarding their tokenized assets on Solana for greener pastures.

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.