Standard Chartered lowered Solana’s end-2026 price target to $250 from $310, leaving its long-term trajectory intact. The bank’s plan still calls for $2,000 by 2030, as the bank says the network’s business structure is shifting from memecoin-based commerce towards stablecoin-based micropayments.

The revised forecast comes as the bank’s digital asset research team sees the current decline as a period in which “performance differentials” across cryptocurrencies should become more apparent, rather than a tape where everything is treated as a single bucket of risk.

Why Standard Chartered is lowering Solana’s 2026 target improves long-term outlook

Behind the 2026 value cut is a more skeptical view of how quickly Solana can turn its cost and performance advantages into a sustainable, fee-generating business that transcends speculative impulses. According to Standard Chartered, Solana is in the midst of a narrative shift that is strategically attractive but not immediate from a market perspective.

Geoffrey Kendrick, director of global digital assets research at Standard Chartered, has cemented a shift in the structure of decentralized exchange (DEX) flows. “When we began covering Solana in May 2025, we observed that network activity was primarily focused on memecoin trading on DEX indices.” “The composition of DEX flows has changed from memecoin trading towards SOL-stablecoin pairs.”

Kendrick argued that this rotation accelerated in 2025 as capital moved away from meme-focused activity, which he believed peaked in mid-January around the launch of the Trump token, and toward tokenized dollars. That means Solana’s DEX business is starting to look more like a payments railroad than a single-cycle casino, even if overall volume has declined.

Standard Chartered also cited Solana’s very low transaction costs as a key enabler of “micropayments” apply cases, including AI-based payments, where even petite overhead costs can disrupt unit economics.

One of the more striking metrics in the report is stablecoin turnover: Kendrick said that stablecoin trading speeds on the Solana platform are already two to three times faster than on Ethereum, suggesting that Solana could play a distinct role in high-frequency, low-value transfers.

The bank tied this capability to “native” payment protocols such as Coinbase-backed x402, while warning that the transition would take time to translate into market leadership.

This slower schedule is one of the reasons Standard Chartered expects Solana to lag Ethereum in the 2026-2027 period, even as the bank begins to more constructively leverage Solana’s long-term benefits if demand for micropayments increases.

Despite reducing the 2026 target, Standard Chartered’s long-term schedule remains aggressive: $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028, $1,200 in 2029 and $2,000 by the end of 2030, according to reporting by Blok. The bank’s framework shows that Solana’s “micropayments” phase is expected to become more vital as the cycle matures, with Kendrick also predicting that Solana will outperform Bitcoin in 2027-2030.

At press time, SOL was trading at $96.93.

Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com