Just like Bitcoin and Ethereum before it, Solana’s recipe of ETFs plus corporate treasuries may fuel an epic Q4 surge.
Solana (SOL) has climbed nearly 30% over the past month and is aiming to reclaim its early 2025 all-time high.
The rally adds weight to Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan’s prediction that the crypto asset could be gearing up for an explosive end-of-year rally, as he believes that all the right “ingredients “are falling into place for a repeat of the same playbook that drove Bitcoin and Ethereum to massive gains.
In the latest report, Hougan argued that the “recipe” over the last 18 months has been simple: strong demand from exchange-traded products (ETPs) and corporate treasury purchases consistently outstripping new token issuance, creating powerful supply-and-demand imbalances.
Bitcoin saw this play out from $40,000 in early 2024 to over $115,000 today, while Ethereum tripled in price after institutions began piling in earlier this year. Solana, he contends, is next in line to benefit from this recipe.
Several heavyweight issuers, including Bitwise, Grayscale, VanEck, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, and Invesco/Galaxy, have filed to launch spot SOL ETPs, with the SEC’s decision deadline set for October 10, 2025. If approved, Q4 could see multiple SOL ETPs hitting the market at once, which is expected to open the floodgates for mainstream inflows.
At the same time, Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital recently pledged $1.65 billion to fund Forward Industries, a new publicly traded SOL treasury company tasked with buying and staking SOL to generate yield.
The appointment of Kyle Samani, Multicoin Capital’s co-founder and long-time Solana advocate, as chairman positions him to play the same evangelist role for Solana that Michael Saylor did for Bitcoin and Tom Lee for Ethereum. That kind of high-profile media presence could supercharge investor awareness and adoption.
Beyond financial vehicles, the exec also went on to highlight that Solana offers a strong fundamental pitch – it is a high-throughput, low-cost programmable blockchain capable of handling tokenized assets, stablecoins, and DeFi at speeds rivaling centralized systems.
A recent technical upgrade slashed transaction finality from 12 seconds to just 150 milliseconds, which positioned it among the fastest blockchains globally, with sub-penny fees and no reliance on Layer 2 workarounds.
While critics argue this comes with centralization risks, Hougan said that Solana currently ranks third in stablecoin liquidity, fourth in tokenized assets, and has seen tokenized AUM jump 140% this year.
The Bitwise CIO deemed Solana’s comparatively small size a major catalyst. This is because at a $116 billion market cap, SOL is just one-twentieth the size of Bitcoin, meaning inflows have an outsized impact.
Forward Industries’ planned $1.65 billion purchase, for example, is equivalent to $33 billion flowing into Bitcoin. While Solana’s inflation rate of roughly 4.3% is higher than Bitcoin’s or Ethereum’s, the demand-side momentum could far outweigh this factor. As such, Hougan argues that SOL’s setup is still attractive.
