Why Standard Chartered lowered Solana price target for 2026 but raised it to $2,000 by 2030

Solana price is moving beyond its memecoin casino phase toward becoming a micropayments powerhouse.

And that’s bound to boost its price well into the four-digit territory, argued UK-based Standard Chartered.

The price he’s forecasting is lofty: $2,000 by 2030.

“We expect micropayment uses to expand as new applications are built (likely over the next two to three years), and we think Solana is uniquely positioned to capture most of this expansion,” Geoffrey Kendrick, Standard Chartered’s global head of digital assets research, wrote in a February 3 report.

Until then, however, Kendrick reckons there’s more downside for the $57 billion cryptocurrency.

He lowered Solana’s price target to $250 from $310 by the end of 2026. Right now, Solana trades at $102.

After that, clear skies ahead. Kendrick forecasts $400 by the end of next year, $700 by the end of 2028, $1,200 by 2029, and finally a staggering $2,000 by the end of 2030.

The bet hinges on the premise that Solana’s low-fee transactions will unlock an entirely new market for payments too small to be processed on other blockchain networks.

Micropayments, or tiny transactions of just a few cents that let you pay per use rather than via subscription, have long been pitched as a key problem that crypto could solve.

They could let users pay for individual articles instead of news subscriptions, reward content creators per view, or enable AI agents to pay each other automatically for services.

So far, however, that hasn’t been viable because traditional payment processors charge $0.30 per transaction. Even Ethereum sometimes costs too much for a microtransaction.

That’s changing.

Breakthrough

Until now, the breakthrough hasn’t been that users can make stablecoin payments, since that’s been happening for years. Now they are cheap enough for transactions to be economically viable.

The first platform demonstrating this is x402, a Coinbase protocol that enables stablecoin payments. Its average transaction size is just $0.06.

But there’s a problem. As the protocol currently runs primarily on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer-2 solution. Base has an average gas fee of $0.015, which means costs consume 25% of a typical x402 transaction.

“Base’s average gas fee of USD 0.015 may make this unsustainable over time,” Kendrick wrote.

Meanwhile, Solana’s median fee is $0.0007, or 20 times cheaper than Base.

“SOL’s ultra-low cost enables micropayments in a way that was not possible before,” Kendrick wrote.

Traditional payment processors are the ones most threatened by a blockchain like Solana. Stripe, for instance, charges roughly $0.30 per transaction, making micropayments economically impossible. PayPal, another traditional payment giant, charges up to $0.49 plus a percentage of every transaction.

Memecoins to stablecoins

Stablecoin usage on Solana has also boomed.

The market value of these cryptocurrencies has grown faster on Solana than on any other network over the past 12 months, according to DefiLlama data.

About $13 billion worth of stablecoins are live on Solana right now.

More importantly, stablecoins on Solana are used differently from those on Ethereum.

The same dollar of stablecoins gets used two to three times more frequently on Solana than Ethereum, Kendrick said.

That suggests they’re being used for payments rather than just stored as savings.

“If more SOL-stablecoin activity takes place on Solana via micropayments, this will result in a higher SOL price,” Kendrick wrote.

Pedro Solimano is a markets correspondent based in Buenos Aires. Got a tip? Email him atpsolimano@dlnews.com.