Black_Kira/Shutterstock and Adobe modified by Blockworks
This is a segment from the Lightspeed newsletter. To read full editions, subscribe.
I’m putting my crystal ball abilities to the test this year.
As we turn the page on 2024, here are five Solana predictions for 2025:
1. Elon Musk’s X will debut a native Solana token
It’s time. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, crypto fans speculated that the dogecoin-loving billionaire would integrate crypto into the social media platform. Those predictions have so far been quashed by Musk, but with the incoming Trump administration expected to loosen US crypto regulations and bring crypto-friendly voices to the table, I think an X token is finally on the way.
“Crypto Twitter” is still a vibrant community, so there would be demand for such a token, and Musk’s other companies are known to hold crypto on their balance sheets. X Premium users could pay for their subscriptions using the X token, which Musk could cheaply on- and off-ramp with help from his stablecoin buddies over at Bridge. Solana has the high throughput and low transaction fees to make this all feasible.
To sweeten the deal, Solana Blinks could make ecommerce happen natively on X without users leaving the app — a feature from which TikTok recently found success. If X wants to be an everything app, why wouldn’t that moniker extend to currency too?
2. Solana’s stablecoin market cap will quadruple
Solana’s onchain volume and demand woke up in a major way in 2024, but stablecoins stayed sleepy. The blockchain currently houses roughly $5 billion in stables, which ranks it fifth among blockchains behind Ethereum, Tron, BSC, and Arbitrum, according to DeFiLlama.
This is partly because Solana transactions often don’t require stablecoin pairs for actions like memecoin trading, but stables can play an important role in other use cases like DePIN or payments. With startups like Perena and Lulo focused on growing the Solana stablecoin pie and issuers like PayPal and Sky launching on the chain, Solana could be primed for major growth in 2024.
I think Solana’s stablecoin market cap will cross $20 billion by the end of the year, which equates to a 4x increase from its current levels. That would still leave Solana far behind Ethereum, which holds some $110 billion in stablecoins at the moment.
3. Solana ETFs will be approved but will underperform ETH
Ok, time for some cold water: I’m not bullish on solana ETFs.
I think solana funds are likely to be approved this year as a Paul Atkins-led SEC takes a less stringent stance on defining cryptoassets as securities, but I don’t think SOL ETFs are likely to find all that much demand.
Crypto ETFs’ raison d’etre is giving investors regulated access to crypto within things like brokerage accounts. With bitcoin, this makes sense. Its “digital gold” narrative is sticky, it is by far the largest crypto, and curious boomers could be interested in allocating 1% of their portfolios to see where things go. Ether ETFs have done okay partly due to the novelty of the products, but it’s been a little harder to sell investors on them.
Solana is more degen and less boomer than either BTC or ETH. A lot of SOL buyers seem to be more likely to onboard via Phantom or Coinbase than with their retirement accounts. By the time SOL ETFs get approved, BTC/ETH combo, Litecoin, HBAR, and possibly XRP will all also have ETFs, Bloomberg’s James Seyffart said.
Look, all I’m saying is there’s a reason BlackRock and Fidelity are yet to file for SOL ETFs. ETH ETFs have seen $35 billion in inflows in their first five months of trading. I expect SOL ETFs will have fewer inflows over their first five months.
4. Pump.fun won’t collect the most fees among memecoin platforms
One of the most interesting stories to watch in Solanaland this year has been the unprecedented rise of memecoin launchpad pump.fun. Since launching in early 2024, pump has already crossed $330 million in revenue. Multiple times, purportedly-better versions of pump.fun have come out, but no one has been able to snatch the crown in the memecoin sector.
But all good things must end, and I think pump.fun will be passed by another app this year. Speculative platforms tend to have a short shelf life in crypto — just ask the investors who valued OpenSea at $13.3 billion in 2022.
I think memecoins will continue to be a very large contributor to Solana’s onchain volumes this year, but I don’t think the majority of that volume will play out on pump.fun. If I had to guess, I’d say the heir apparent will be something AI-related.
5. Solana will not experience a major outage
Solana has experienced a number of outages in its four-year lifetime. This might be naive of me, but I don’t think it will add another outage to that ledger in 2025.
This is a bold take because Firedancer, a fully unique Solana client, is set to take its training wheels off and greatly increase Solana’s throughput this year. This will create a lot of unseen potential risk vectors that could bring the chain down.
But Solana’s frequency of outages has fallen over the past two years, presumably as the network’s developers learned from previous mistakes. The Solana Labs spin-off Anza recently created an invalidator team meant to stress test the network. Plus, Jump’s Firedancer client took years to build, and the rollout has taken place over multiple phases.
What’s another outage-less 12 months?
Get the news in your inbox. Explore Blockworks newsletters:
- Blockworks Daily: The newsletter that helps thousands of investors understand crypto and the markets, by Byron Gilliam.
- Empire: Start your morning with the top news and analysis to inform your day in crypto.
- Forward Guidance: Reporting and analysis on the growing intersection of crypto and macroeconomics, policy and finance.
- 0xResearch: Alpha directly in your inbox. Market highlights, data, degen trade ideas, governance updates, token performance and more.
- Lightspeed: Built for Solana investors, developers and community members. The latest from one of crypto’s hottest networks.
- The Drop: For crypto collectors and traders, covering apps, games, memes and more.
- Supply Shock: Tracking Bitcoin’s rise from internet plaything worth less than a penny to global phenomenon disrupting money as we know it.
