Would you wish to spend money on a retailer that will get numerous paying clients, or one that does not? The identical precept applies to blockchains, because the chains that accumulate essentially the most charges are those folks truly use.
Proper now the busiest retailer is Solana, (SOL -0.37%) which has raked in additional protocol income than some other community for 3 straight quarters and counting. Moreover, at roughly $150 per coin, its market nonetheless costs it like an also-ran relatively than a star participant. That mismatch between money coming in and worth going out is why I believe the token can prime $500 inside 5 years.
Community income and app income are profitable the day
Let’s make clear two crucial ideas for evaluating cryptocurrencies like Solana: Community income, and utility income.
Community income is solely the sum of charges customers pay to get their transactions registered right into a block on the chain. Software income, alternatively, is the sum complete of income generated by the functions working on a series.
Excessive community and app income means heavy exercise, within the type of decentralized finance (DeFi) swaps, non-fungible token (NFT) mints, funds for companies, and borrowing or lending flows. Within the 24 hours main as much as July 8, Solana introduced in $1.3 million in community income, and its app ecosystem introduced in $8.6 million, vastly outclassing all of its opponents by a big margin.
This streak has been accelerating in the latest quarter. Solana booked greater than $571 million in app income in second-quarter 2025, leaving Ethereum‘s $200 million within the mud. Day by day snapshots inform the identical story. On July 6, Solana captured nearly half of all layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) community earnings worldwide.
Picture supply: Getty Pictures.
Why do customers maintain piling in? Begin with transaction prices and velocity.
A typical Solana transaction prices about $0.00025 and settles in a few seconds, in contrast with Ethereum’s multi-dollar fuel payments that arrive fashionably late. These economics make Solana the chain of selection for high-frequency decentralized alternate (DEX) buying and selling, driving 46% of all decentralized-app income throughout crypto final quarter.
App builders comply with the cash, as they will not receives a commission in any other case. On that entrance, greater than 7,600 new builders joined the ecosystem in 2024, the quickest development within the sector by far. A much bigger dev base seeds extra apps, which beget extra customers, which inflate income, making the Solana flywheel precisely what Ethereum pioneered however is now struggling to take care of.
Taken collectively, 9 months of income management sign that Solana owns essentially the most vibrant storefront in crypto. Subsequent comes turning that money register ring into worth appreciation, which is able to take time.
The trail to $500 may be very believable from right here
Given the above, the chances of Solana rising considerably over the approaching years are pretty favorable.
Hitting a goal of $500 from $152 requires a 229% climb, or roughly a 3.3x return from the place the coin is at present.
That sounds heroic till you keep in mind that Solana traded close to $260 in late 2021, with far much less adoption than at present, and with virtually zero by way of its DeFi utility income. Assuming community income retains compounding whereas fee-burn mechanics retire a slice of each transaction price, the float of obtainable tokens will tighten over time, pushing the worth lever upward.
Pace and value aren’t the one attracts. Solana’s single-shard structure lets each sensible contract and program see the identical state without delay, reducing the complexity of cross-chain bridges which have plagued rivals with hacks and downtime. If big-ticket actual world asset (RWA) platforms or AI inference markets choose a series for throughput causes, Solana’s capability to course of 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) makes it a frontrunner.
Nonetheless, 5 years is loads of time for potholes alongside the way in which. A tough regulatory crackdown on low-fee chains, a catastrophic validator outage, or Ethereum’s long-awaited darksharding improve might all erode Solana’s edge.
Macro shocks matter, too. If liquidity vanishes from the market, payment income will comply with it down for each its apps and the community itself.
Even so, the core thesis is straightforward. Cash talks.
When a series out-earns everybody else for 9 straight months, the market often notices ultimately. If Solana’s income retains sprinting whereas its tokenomics quietly throttle provide, a triple-digit price ticket beginning with “5” isn’t any stretch by any means over the subsequent few years.
In truth, I predict that it will occur earlier than 2030, as a result of proper now, its opponents merely cannot sustain with its most important attracts.
