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

Standard Chartered's global head of digital assets research, Geoffrey Kendrick, views the recent crypto selloff as a buying opportunity, favoring selective positioning. Kendrick lowered the end-2026 price forecast for Solana (SOL) from $310 to $250, citing the time needed for its next dominant use case to scale, but raised longer-term projections significantly up to $2,000 by 2030. The firm believes Solana is evolving from being dominated by memecoin trading toward micropayments, evidenced by a shift in decentralized exchange (DEX) activity towards SOL-stablecoin pairs. Solana's low transaction costs are unlocking new use cases like AI-driven micropayments, with stablecoins turning over faster than on Ethereum. However, Standard Chartered expects Solana to underperform Ethereum through 2026 and 2027 before gradually catching up as micropayment adoption matures, reiterating Ethereum as its preferred near-term large-cap asset.

(Source：The Block)