Few markets reward patience like crypto, yet it's also true that few punish complacency faster. Over longer time horizons, like five years, a lot can happen -- including growth that doubles an investment's value. And that means an investment on the order of $5,000 has a real shot of becoming $10,000 in relatively little time in the big scheme of things.

So the question is not whether Solana (SOL -3.41%) can double, but what must go right, for how long, and what cannot go wrong in order for it to happen. Here's the roadmap.

The odds look great here

Let's start with a quick assessment of the chain's raw horsepower, because superior performance metrics often translate into superior returns.

Solana can clear about 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), the highest of any public blockchain, while its fees stay well below $0.01, and transactions settle in usually less than a second. Those features resonate with merchants, who need rapid settlement in very high volumes, and who prefer cheap transactions (much like everyone else).

In particular, Visa shifted its stablecoin settlement pilot from Ethereum to Solana in September 2023, after its own trials found it to have dramatically faster clearing and lower costs on average. Furthermore, Shopify followed by rolling out a Solana Pay app that lets millions of storefronts accept certain stablecoins with virtually zero interchange fees.

The network is also grabbing a first‑mover advantage in new verticals, like decentralized physical infrastructure networks (DePIN). DePIN projects are how you could create something like a physical tollbooth that grants passage in exchange for a cryptocurrency payment, among many other possible uses. For instance, there are now dozens of DePIN projects building wireless, storage, and sensor networks atop the Solana chain, with more on the way.

An investor looks at a tablet computer and some papers on her table as she considers an investment.

Image source: Getty Images.

On the artificial intelligence side, Render completed its shift from Ethereum to Solana in mid‑2024, citing the parallel execution capabilities of Solana as critical for its computing power‑sharing markets. A cluster of smaller AI tokens has since followed Render into the ecosystem, and there's a good chance that more will follow.

Wall Street is beginning to notice. Many analysts are expecting the approval of a Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) before the end of the year. One asset manager, REX-Osprey, is moving forward with such an ETF that doesn't require the typical SEC approval process, with introduction as early as the first week of July.

A full SEC green light for the instruments taking the traditional approval route would open a compliant on‑ramp for financial advisors and squeeze an already limited floating supply. That's likely to send the price upward.

Taken together, the chain's high throughput, growing usage as a payment rail, surging DePIN and AI demand, and a likely grouping of ETFs hitting the market soon give the bull case a straightforward path to the relatively modest 15% compound annual growth rate needed for a doubling over the next five years.

Don't ignore the pitfalls here

A good probability of Solana doubling by 2030 is not a certainty.

The SEC could still deny or hamstring a Solana ETF, and Ethereum's own ETF launch showed interest can fade once the first allocations arrive rather than driving a huge surge in the coin's price.

There is also the persistence of Solana's "meme coin casino" narrative, which may not play in its favor over the long term. The presence of speculative tokens can scare institutions and regulators away if retail investors get hurt. Remember, no serious asset manager is going to want to store their money on a chain with the reputation for being mostly a casino. And a blow‑up of some kind could tarnish Solana's brand just as payment pilots scale.

Technical resilience is another concern. The chain has avoided day‑long outages since February 2023, but any prolonged downtime would undercut the speed thesis.

If those hazards stay dormant, and they probably will, and the macro backdrop is at least neutral, a doubling by 2030 with Solana looks far more likely than not. The upside improves even further if credit card traffic scales and ETF inflows land ahead of schedule. Keep an eye on the chain's adoption data, and be ready to hold your investment for at least a few years to make sure that you squeeze as much growth out of it as possible even if it doesn't increase twofold.