Even though Solana has been through major ups and downs, it is still among the largest cryptocurrencies on the market. At the time of writing, SOL commands a market cap of $9.4 billion, which makes it the 9th largest crypto asset overall. 

Despite its extreme volatility, Solana is still one of the most promising cryptocurrency projects and could very well remain a big player over the long term. In this article, we will be taking a look at some long-term scenarios, including a Solana price prediction for 2040 and 2050.

Solana has only been on the market for about 3 years, so it’s difficult to make any kind of long-term price predictions based on SOL’s price history so far. On average, SOL has displayed 3,740% yearly growth on average, which is obviously not going to be sustainable. 

To make a more realistic Solana price prediction for 2050 and 2040, we should use more conservative benchmarks for yearly growth. Here’s a table showing what the price of 1 SOL would be assuming different average yearly growth figures.

*The S&P 500 index’s average rate of return over the past 66 years. The calculations assume a SOL price of $23.30 (as of July 25, 2023).

Solana’s price history

If you are looking to invest in crypto and Solana is on your shortlist, it’s important to understand how SOL got to the place where it is now. Before we take a closer look at the predictions for Solana’s future, let’s analyze Solana’s price history to get a better context.

Solana made its debut on the market in April 2020, with SOL changing hands between $0.50 and $0.80 in the first few months of trading. Towards the end of 2020, SOL surpassed the $1 mark for the first time ever, and hasn’t returned below this price level since.

In 2021, Solana demonstrated one of the most impressive bullish rallies in the history of the crypto markets. SOL, which traded at about $1.6 on January 1, 2023, peaked at a whopping $259 by November of the same year. This represented a more than 160x price increase in less than a year.

However, this massive rally also meant that there was a lot of room to fall when the cryptocurrency market as a whole turned bearish. By December 2022, SOL had crashed all the way down to $9.10 before buyers stepped in and mounted a recovery.

Since the start of 2023, the price of SOL has increased by about 135%, which provides some confidence that the prices in December 2022 represented a bottom for Solana.

However, despite this impressive recovery, SOL still has a very long way to go before it can match its former glory. At the time of writing, SOL is down 91% from its all-time high price, making it one of the crypto top 100’s worst performers in this regard.

In terms of quarterly returns, we can see that SOL has posted 7 positive quarters and 6 negative quarters so far. The coin’s most successful quarter was Q1 2021, when SOL saw a +1,190% price increase.

Solana crypto price prediction for 2040

We’ve already mentioned that using Solana’s average yearly growth so far is not very helpful when making a long-term prediction. If SOL were to grow by 3,740% each year, we would see the coin hit truly astronomical prices by 2040. 

Instead, let’s use more conservative benchmarks to estimate how high Solana can go by 2040. The S&P 500 index, which is used as a benchmark for measuring the growth of the U.S. equities market, has grown by an average of 11.8% over the past 66 years.

If we plug this rate of return into our crypto profit calculator, we can see what the price of SOL would be if it grew by 11.8% every year until 2040. We are using $23.3 as the initial investment since this is the price of SOL at the time of writing. 

Under this assumption, the price of Solana in 2040 would be $173.5, a 7.4x increase compared to the current price.

Let’s see what happens if we assume a more ambitious rate of return. Over the last 5 years, Bitcoin has grown by 22.2% on average. This projection is perhaps more interesting as it is rooted in the historical price performance of the leading cryptocurrency asset, which has more in common with SOL than a stock index.

Using our crypto profit calculator, we can see that SOL would be priced at $869.2 if it grew at an average yearly rate of 22.2% until 2040. This would be an approximately 37x price increase compared to the current Solana price. 

Solana crypto price prediction for 2050

Now, let’s use the same growth rates to project what the price of Solana could be in 2050.

If we assume Solana would follow the S&P 500 average yearly growth rate of 11.8%, SOL would have a price of $529.3 by 2050. This would be an increase of 22.7x compared to the current SOL price.

Meanwhile, if we use Bitcoin’s average yearly growth rate over the last 5 years (22.2%) as our benchmark, the price of SOL would get quite extreme in 2050. Under this assumption, the price of SOL in 2050 would be $6,419, or 274x the current price. 

Given the current supply of SOL, this would imply a market capitalization of $2 trillion for Solana. Since not even Bitcoin has reached such a market capitalization yet, we can say that it’s pretty unlikely that SOL would reach this price level.

Solana price forecast 2040, 2050: Algorithm's predictions are in line with our model projections

The CoinCodex SOL price prediction is forecasting that the coin will be trading at $102 one year from now. After that, we could see a retracement below $60 by 2025.

By 2040, Solana is predicted to climb to $440, which would be a 1,800% increase from current price levels. The prediction for 2050 is ever more bullish, as the algorithm projects a move above $950.

Interestingly, our algorithm's price prediction loosely reflects model predictions made using historical growth rates recorded by the S&P 500 and Bitcoin.

Long-term catalysts for Solana

Despite the volatility in the SOL markets, the Solana community has been pushing forward with new products and developments. The platform has a flourishing ecosystem of wallets, explorers, DeFi apps, NFT marketplaces, and more.

Solana developers are making a strong push into the mobile market with the Solana Mobile Stack (SMS) software suite and the Saga, a flagship-level smartphone catering to blockchain users.

In addition, we’ve seen several interesting projects launch on Solana recently, which shows that talented developers are still interested in building on the platform thanks to its scalability and efficiency. One such example is the content monetization protocol Access Protocol. In addition, the decentralized network infrastructure project Helium migrated from its own blockchain over to Solana earlier this year.

On the other hand, there are also a few reasons why Solana might not see much growth in the future. The fast development of layer 2 solutions for Ethereum could make Solana redundant if the Ethereum layer 2s manage to reach similar performance. In addition, Solana doesn’t have the best reputation in some parts of the crypto community due to the several outages that made the network temporarily unavailable.

The bottom line: Is Solana a good long-term bet?

Solana could certainly be a strong performer over the long term, but we should be careful about using SOL’s growth up to this point as a benchmark for how it will perform in the future. While Solana is certainly not dead, we shouldn’t expect SOL to make the same kind of jump as it did in 2021.

If you’re interested in the future of Solana, check out our article exploring the question of whether SOL is a good investment.