Asset manager VanEck says Solana could surge to $520 per token by the end of 2025, according to their latest market report released today.
Right now, Solana holds 15% of the smart contract platform (SCP) market. But VanEck predicts that share will jump to 22% by December, thanks to its developer dominance, rising DEX trading volume, higher revenue, and a growing user base.
Their forecast ties directly to the US M2 money supply, which historically tracks crypto’s market performance. VanEck projects M2 will hit $22.3 trillion by 2025, growing at a 3.2% annual rate. With that growth, the SCP market cap is expected to rise 43% from $770 billion now to $1.1 trillion by 2025.
If those numbers hold, VanEck says Solana’s market cap will hit $250 billion, bringing its token price to $520, based on the current 486 million floating tokens.
Using an autoregressive (AR) forecast model, we estimate Solana’s market cap will reach ~$250B, implying a SOL price of $520 based on ~486M floating tokens.
SOL’s price was also affected by the global correction of financial markets that was triggered by President Donald Trump’s tariffs on Mexico, Canada, and China.
Validators set to cash in on major fee proposal
Meanwhile, Solana validators, who run the network and process transactions, are about to see their wallets swell, but stakers aren’t exactly happy about it. The implementation of SIMD-0096 will send 100% of Solana’s priority fees directly to validators, starting in March 2025, and it’s coming after a vote in May 2024 when validators approved the proposal to eliminate side deals some were making with users outside of the network.
Before the SIMD-0096 proposal, users and validators could strike under-the-table deals to bypass the fee burn and split the rewards, but now, validators don’t have an in-protocol way to share the extra fees with their stakers.
Stakers, who delegate their SOL tokens to validators in exchange for a share of the rewards, now risk getting cut out of this windfall entirely. Some developers argue this could lead to validators inflating priority fees for personal gain. But despite the warnings, the proposal is moving forward.
Solana’s priority fees reached $240 million in January alone, according to Blockworks Research. Had SIMD-0096 been fully implemented then, Solana’s real economic value would have jumped by 22%. But without a system to share those rewards, stakers wouldn’t have seen any of it.
