Viewing the recent steep drop as a great chance for long-term outperformance, especially against Bitcoin, Geoff Kendrick, head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, has advised purchasing premium cryptocurrencies such Solana (SOL). Although short-term pressure from more general market downturn and its association with meme-coin, Kendrick stresses Solana’s solid fundamentals — SOL has fallen roughly 60% from its highs and is trading in early February 2026 at about $97-$100, near multi-month lows. He advises investors to build “quality” assets immediately, positioning SOL for great upside as the network grows beyond speculative trading.
The bank has updated its Solana price targets and reduced the end-2026 prediction to $250 from a previous $310 because of the time required for Solana’s next big application, stablecoin micropayments and high-velocity transactions, to fully mature. Long-term projections, though, have been greatly raised: $400 by end-2027 (up from $350), $700 by 2028 (up from $475), $1,200 by 2029 (up from $500), and a audacious new target of $2,000 by 2030. This shows optimism over Solana’s ultra-low costs (permitting 2-3 times quicker stablecoin velocity than Ethereum) and emerging AI-driven micropayments (e.g., x402 protocols), which could unlock completely new markets and fuel explosive adoption in the following years.
Though Solana will lag Ethereum in the near term (through 2026-2027) as scaling for institutional and artificial intelligence applications advances slowly, Kendrick expects it to outperform Bitcoin substantially from 2027 onward through 2030. Although current pricing includes a “meme discount,” strong catch-up potential is indicated by increasing institutional exposure (with digital asset treasuries holding around 3% of SOL supply) and a movement of on-chain activity toward stablecoin pairings. The drop is viewed in general as a strategic entrance for patient investors wagering on Solana’s metamorphosis into a leading high-throughput network layer and micropayments.
