All the ingredients are there for an epic end-of-year run for Solana.

For the last 18 months, the recipe for strong returns in crypto has been clear: Take one part ETP inflows, add strong corporate treasury purchases, and voilà—you get big returns.

Bitcoin followed this recipe from $40,000 in January 2024 to $112,000 today. Ethereum discovered the same recipe in April 2025, and prices have since tripled to $4,500.

It’s no surprise that the recipe works. It’s classic supply and demand.

• Since January 11, 2024, the bitcoin network has produced 322,681 bitcoin, while ETPs and corporations have bought more than 1.1 million.
• Since April 15, 2025, the Ethereum network has produced 388,568 ETH, while ETPs and corporations have acquired 7.4 million.

When demand exceeds supply, prices typically go up.

Why I Think Solana (SOL) Is Next

Solana has the conditions to follow this path.

Multiple issuers—Bitwise, Grayscale, VanEck, Franklin Templeton, Fidelity, Invesco/Galaxy, and Canary Capital—have filed to launch spot Solana ETPs. The SEC is set to rule on these filings on or before October 10, 2025, meaning we may have multiple issuers pushing spot Solana ETPs in Q4.¹

Meanwhile, this past weekend, three major firms—Galaxy Digital, Jump Crypto, and Multicoin Capital—committed $1.65 billion in cash and stablecoins to a large-scale, publicly traded Solana treasury company, Forward Industries. Upon closing, the new firm will begin buying SOL, staking it, and aiming to generate excess returns.²

Notably, Forward Industries named Kyle Samani, co-founder of Multicoin Capital, as chairman. Multicoin was one of the first investors in Solana, and Samani has been among its most articulate and consistent promoters. (You can read Multicoin’s latest thesis on Solana here.) Michael Saylor has played a key part in promoting bitcoin from his role as executive chairman of Strategy, a bitcoin treasury company, and Tom Lee has done the same for Ethereum as chairman of BitMine, an Ethereum treasury company. If Samani can similarly carry the Solana message on CNBC, Bloomberg, and Fox Business, it will help drive the flywheel of investor demand.

What’s Solana’s Pitch?

Of course, the mere existence of an ETP and a treasury company doesn’t guarantee investors will buy in. There has to be a fundamental reason for investors to be interested in those vehicles. Case in point: Despite Ethereum ETFs being approved in June 2024, Ethereum didn’t catch fire until April 2025, when rising interest in stablecoins sparked investors’ interest in the top blockchain for stablecoins.

So, what’s Solana’s pitch?

Solana is an Ethereum competitor. It’s a programmable blockchain designed to host stablecoins, tokenized assets, and decentralized finance applications, among other things. Solana’s big calling card is that it’s able to process significantly more transactions per second than Ethereum, while doing so cheaply (transactions cost <$0.01) and with rapid finality. In fact, the blockchain recently approved a major technical upgrade that will slash the time it takes to finalize transactions from approximately 12 seconds to 150 milliseconds—literally the blink of an eye. Once live, the upgrade will make Solana among the fastest blockchains in the world.

Solana achieves this through a very different technical design than Ethereum. It doesn’t rely on Layer 2 networks, making the blockchain simpler for users as well.

Critics argue that Solana is able to make this happen because of a key tradeoff: It’s more centralized and fragile.

Still, it has attracted users. Solana is third in stablecoin liquidity among programmable blockchains, after Ethereum and Tron, and fourth in tokenized assets. And it’s growing fast: Tokenized asset AUM is up 140% so far this year. Its promoters argue that Solana is the only blockchain fast enough to support the tokenization of major assets at a global scale.

One Key Difference With Solana

There’s one major difference between Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana that’s worth noting: Solana is comparatively tiny.

As of September 7, bitcoin’s market cap was $2.22 trillion, Ethereum’s market cap was $519 billion, and Solana’s market cap was $116 billion. In other words, Solana is 1/20th the size of bitcoin and less than 1/4th the size of Ethereum.

Scaled for the size of the blockchain, a relatively small amount of flows into Solana could significantly impact prices. For instance, Forward Industries’ $1.6 billion purchase of Solana shares would be the equivalent of $33 billion in bitcoin purchases. This is offset somewhat by Solana’s higher annual inflation rate (~4.3%) compared to both bitcoin (0.8%) and Ethereum (~0.5%).

But the setup is still attractive. My suggestion? Keep your eye on Solana in the coming months.

Notes:

(1) It’s worth noting that a version of a Solana ETF already exists in the Rex-Osprey Staked Solana ETF (ticker: SSK), which launched earlier this year and has $220 million in assets. But that fund uses a non-traditional structure and is not a traditional spot crypto ETP.

(2) Small Solana treasury companies exist as well, including SOL Strategies, which holds roughly $100 million in SOL.

Risks and Important Information

No Advice on Investment; Risk of Loss: Prior to making any investment decision, each investor must undertake its own independent examination and investigation, including the merits and risks involved in an investment, and must base its investment decision—including a determination whether the investment would be a suitable investment for the investor—on such examination and investigation.

Crypto assets are digital representations of value that function as a medium of exchange, a unit of account, or a store of value, but they do not have legal tender status. Crypto assets are sometimes exchanged for U.S. dollars or other currencies around the world, but they are not currently backed nor supported by any government or central bank. Their value is completely derived by market forces of supply and demand, and they are more volatile than traditional currencies, stocks, or bonds.

Trading in crypto assets comes with significant risks, including volatile market price swings or flash crashes, market manipulation, and cybersecurity risks and risk of losing principal or all of your investment. In addition, crypto asset markets and exchanges are not regulated with the same controls or customer protections available in equity, option, futures, or foreign exchange investing.

Crypto asset trading requires knowledge of crypto asset markets. In attempting to profit through crypto asset trading, you must compete with traders worldwide. You should have appropriate knowledge and experience before engaging in substantial crypto asset trading. Crypto asset trading can lead to large and immediate financial losses. Under certain market conditions, you may find it difficult or impossible to liquidate a position quickly at a reasonable price.

The opinions expressed represent an assessment of the market environment at a specific time and are not intended to be a forecast of future events, or a guarantee of future results, and are subject to further discussion, completion and amendment. The information herein is not intended to provide, and should not be relied upon for, accounting, legal or tax advice, or investment recommendations. You should consult your accounting, legal, tax or other advisors about the matters discussed herein.

Disclaimer:

1. This article is reprinted from [experts]. All copyrights belong to the original author [Matt Hougan]. If there are objections to this reprint, please contact the Gate Learn team, and they will handle it promptly.
2. Liability Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and do not constitute any investment advice.
3. Translations of the article into other languages are done by the Gate Learn team. Unless mentioned, copying, distributing, or plagiarizing the translated articles is prohibited.