Matt Hougan, chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, said he believes Solana could become a trillion-dollar asset within five years – which would roughly translate to a SOL price of around $1,600 on a market-cap basis per token, depending on circulating supply.

Hougan made these comments on the January 29 episode of When Shift Happens, articulating his view of Solana through what he called a “two ways to win” setup: growth in the addressable market (stable coins and tokenized assets) and Solana’s growing share relative to rival networks.

Why Solana Can Reach Over $1,600 in 5 Years

Hougan argued that the “infrastructure market” for stablecoins and tokenization is growing quick enough that huge, liquid L1s should be valued not so much as niche crypto experiments, but more like the rails that enable customary finance. “The U.S. Treasury Secretary expects the stablecoin market to grow 12 times over the next four years,” he said, adding that Larry Fink described a future in which “every asset, every fund, ETF, stock, bond and real estate will be tokenized.”

From this point on, Solana’s doctoral thesis relied heavily on relative positioning. Ethereum remains a leader in stablecoins and tokenization, Hougan said, but Solana is “a legitimate competitor with an interesting technological differentiation” and, most importantly, “is extremely easy to use and puts the community first.”

In his opinion, this aspect of usability is underestimated by investors who focus on benchmark-style comparisons. “I think ease of use is a killer app that is undervalued by investors,” Hougan said. “Traders like to talk about bandwidth and they like to talk…TPS…who cares?…For the end user who is trading and constantly growing, ease of use is a killer app. And Solana is just easy to use, just incredibly easy to use.”

Hougan also admitted that investors have a blind spot: Token supply dynamics can decouple price action from market capitalization growth. He noted that Solana’s market value could augment significantly even if the token price reaches previous highs again, and suggested that staking yields partially offset dilution, citing “roughly 7% per year.”

Another topic of discussion was how regulations shape institutional behavior. Hougan said Solana’s involvement in stablecoins and tokenization was confined in the previous U.S. regulatory environment, arguing that institutions “could not rely on Solana” if they believed it was “outside the regulatory perimeter.” He said as the clouds lift, mandates begin to expand.

He also described why ETF packaging matters more for smaller assets. “You put some inflows into an ETF stack and they chase a relatively small supply of Solana,” Hougan said. “It’s one of the best asset setups I’ve ever seen because you have such a small, limited size, you have high institutional demand, you have stablecoins and tokenization… you put it all together and it seems like a winner.”

Still, it avoided demanding price targets and instead stuck to market capitalization principles. “I think in 5 years it could be an asset worth a trillion dollars. I think it’s relatively easy to imagine it,” he said. “It’s hard to give an exact target because it depends on the growth rate of stablecoins and tokenization. It depends on whether Congress passes the Transparency Act. It depends on the type of cryptocurrency market cycles.”

E156: @Matt_Hougan With @BitwiseInvest – $6.5 Million Bitcoin and Solana’s Strongest Setup Ever?

This may be the most bullish yet rational episode we’ve done on the future of cryptocurrencies: why devaluation, institutional flows, and tokenization are just getting started.

Timestamps:

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— PAN SHIFT 🦁 (@KevinWSHPod) January 29, 2026

From basic market capitalization math, Solana’s $1 trillion valuation implies a four-digit supply-driven token price. The relationship is basic: the token price equals the market capitalization divided by the supply. Based on Solana’s circulating supply of approximately 566 million SOL, the $1 trillion market cap is approximately $1,766 per SOL (1,000,000,000,000 ÷ 566,000,000).

If a fully diluted denominator closer to SOL 619 million is used instead, the same $1 trillion market cap translates to approximately $1,615 per SOL (1,000,000,000,000 ÷ 619,000,000). In other words, Hougan’s “trillion-dollar asset” under today’s supply assumptions is around $1,000 per token, with the exact number changing as supply changes.

It is worth noting that Hougan’s call for Solana was part of a broader macro narrative to which he repeatedly returned: a decline in monetary value pushing investors towards insufficient and non-sovereign stores of value. With respect to Bitcoin, he argued that the “two ways to win” are to develop the store of value market and have Bitcoin take a stake in gold, which he said could generate multi-million-dollar BTC within decades if adoption trends over the past 10 to 15 years continue.

For Solana, the equivalent is less about being “digital gold” and more about becoming a primary destination for stablecoin and tokenized securities flows. If these rails scale and if Solana continues to gain share as a high-speed institution-friendly network, Hougan’s trillion-dollar scenario means the market is still pricing this opportunity too conservatively.

At press time, SOL was trading at $115.40.

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