Solana To Trail Ethereum, Says Standard Chartered: 'We Are Past Peak Meme Coin'

Solana's (CRYPTO: SOL) reliance on meme coin trading as its dominant use case could hold back its performance relative to Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) for the foreseeable future, according to Standard Chartered's Head of FX and Digital Assets Research Geoffrey Kendrick.

What Happened: In a note sent to Benzinga on Tuesday, Kendrick stated that real-world applications on Solana, such as high-throughput financial platforms and consumer-facing services like social media, are "still some years away" from scaling meaningfully.

"Going forward, I think we are past peak-memecoin," Kendrick wrote, adding that while Solana has proven its technical strengths in transaction speed and cost-efficiency, broader sector adoption has yet to materialize.

This gap, he says, will likely cause Solana to underperform Ethereum in the near term.

Solana has captured significant trading volume through meme coin activity, supported by its low transaction fees and high throughput.

Kendrick refers to this dominance as a "double-edged sword."

On the one hand, it has battle-tested the network's ability to handle large volumes cheaply and quickly.

On the other, the market is "applying a quantifiable discount" to Solana's application-layer revenue, what Kendrick calls Solana's “GDP,” because of its heavy concentration in speculative tokens.

Also Read: Bitcoin Rally Has Room To Run, Says Morgan Creek’s Mark Yusko

Why It Matters: Recent declines in meme coin activity on Solana reinforce concerns about the network's reliance on a single sub-sector.

Kendrick highlights that this shrinking base of activity comes at a time when alternative sectors such as real-world financial apps remain underdeveloped.

"A usage gap may exist for a period," he warned, during which SOL may lag ETH on a relative basis.

Kendrick's analysis includes detailed price forecasts.

He expects SOL-USD to rise from its current level of $175 to $275 by the end of 2025, and eventually reach $500 by 2029.

However, when measured against Ethereum, the ETH-SOL exchange rate is projected to increase from 14 to 17 by 2027 before stabilizing.

For comparison, ETH is expected to rise to $4,000 by end-2025 and to $7,500 by 2029.

These projections suggest Ethereum will continue to command a valuation premium over Solana, driven in part by its broader adoption base and more mature ecosystem of financial, gaming, NFT, and institutional applications.

Solana's core strength lies in its architecture, an optimized Layer-1 chain capable of fast and cheap confirmations.

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