Standard Chartered cuts Solana 2026 target to $250, sees shift from 'memecoins to micropayments'

Standard Chartered said the recent selloff across cryptocurrencies has created a buying opportunity, as market stress begins to separate higher-quality protocols from more speculative projects.

Geoffrey Kendrick, global head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, said he is "a buyer of this dip in digital assets," adding that the downturn marks the early stages of greater performance differentiation across the sector.

In a Tuesday note, Kendrick lowered his end-2026 price forecast for Solana (SOL) from $310 to $250, citing the time required for the network’s next dominant use case to scale. At the same time, he raised longer-term projections, forecasting SOL at $400 in 2027, $700 in 2028, $1,200 in 2029, and $2,000 by the end of 2030.

Kendrick said the current environment favors selective positioning rather than broad exposure, as forced selling clears and fundamentals begin to reassert themselves.

Solana’s next act

Standard Chartered said Solana is evolving "from memecoins to micropayments," as decentralized exchange activity shifts toward SOL-stablecoin pairs.

Citing onchain data, the firm said Solana is "no longer a one-trick pony" powered by memecoin trading alone, as was the case last year. "When we initiated coverage of Solana in May 2025, we flagged that activity on Solana was dominated by memecoin trading on decentralised exchanges (DEXs)," Kendrick wrote.

This changed during 2025 as capital moved from meme-focused activity, which peaked with the launch of the Trump coin in mid-January, to tokenized greenbacks.

"A deeper dive into flow types on Solana DEXs, however, shows that along with the decline in transaction volumes, the mix of flows on DEXs has shifted from memecoin trading towards SOL-stablecoin pairs," Kendrick wrote, adding that if it's sustained, "this could suggest that a new sector is opening up for Solana in a post-memecoin world."

Gradual growth, not parabolic movement

According to Kendrick, Solana's ultra-low transaction costs, which he argues have unlocked new use cases such as AI-driven micropayments, are also increasingly propelling the network's allure. The bank said stablecoins on Solana are already turning over two to three times faster than those on Ethereum, suggesting a distinct transactional role is emerging as internet-native protocols like Coinbase-backed x402 gain traction.

However, Kendrick said the transition will take time. Standard Chartered expects Solana to underperform Ethereum through 2026 and 2027 before gradually catching up as micropayment adoption reaches scale. Over the longer term, the bank expects SOL to outperform bitcoin between 2027 and 2030.

In contrast, Standard Chartered reiterated that Ethereum remains its preferred large-cap digital asset in the near term, consistent with its view that stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets will continue to be built primarily on Ethereum. Analysts previously said they expect Ethereum to outclass its peers in 2026 as institutional adoption of stablecoins accelerates, with Solana's upside skewed further out as its micropayment narrative matures.