Would you want to invest in a store that gets a lot of paying customers, or one that doesn’t? The same principle applies to blockchains, as the chains that collect the most fees are the ones people actually use.
Right now the busiest store is Solana, (CRYPTO: SOL) which has raked in more protocol revenue than any other network for three straight quarters and counting. Furthermore, at roughly $150 per coin, its market still prices it like an also-ran rather than a star player. That mismatch between cash coming in and price going out is why I think the token can top $500 within five years.
Let’s clarify two very important concepts for evaluating cryptocurrencies like Solana: Network revenue, and application revenue.
Network revenue is simply the sum of fees users pay to get their transactions registered into a block on the chain. Application revenue, on the other hand, is the sum total of revenue generated by the applications running on a chain.
High network and app revenue means heavy activity, in the form of decentralized finance (DeFi) swaps, non-fungible token (NFT) mints, payments for services, and borrowing or lending flows. In the 24 hours leading up to July 8, Solana brought in $1.3 million in network revenue, and its app ecosystem brought in $8.6 million, vastly outclassing all of its competitors by a large margin.
This streak has been accelerating in the most recent quarter. Solana booked more than $571 million in app revenue in second-quarter 2025, leaving Ethereum‘s $200 million in the dust. Daily snapshots tell the same story. On July 6, Solana captured almost half of all layer 1 (L1) and layer 2 (L2) network earnings worldwide.
Image source: Getty Images.
Why do users keep piling in? Start with transaction costs and speed.
A typical Solana transaction costs about $0.00025 and settles in a couple of seconds, compared with Ethereum’s multi-dollar gas bills that arrive fashionably late. Those economics make Solana the chain of choice for high-frequency decentralized exchange (DEX) trading, driving 46% of all decentralized-app revenue across crypto last quarter.
App developers follow the money, as they won’t get paid otherwise. On that front, more than 7,600 new builders joined the ecosystem in 2024, the fastest growth in the sector by far. A bigger dev base seeds more apps, which beget more users, which inflate revenue, making the Solana flywheel exactly what Ethereum pioneered but is now struggling to maintain.
Taken together, nine months of revenue leadership signal that Solana owns the most vibrant storefront in crypto. Next comes turning that cash register ring into price appreciation, which will take time.
Given the above, the odds of Solana growing significantly over the coming years are fairly favorable.
Hitting a target of $500 from $152 requires a 229% climb, or roughly a 3.3x return from where the coin is today.
That sounds heroic until you remember that Solana traded near $260 in late 2021, with far less adoption than today, and with practically zero in terms of its DeFi application revenue. Assuming network revenue keeps compounding while fee-burn mechanics retire a slice of every transaction cost, the float of available tokens will tighten over time, pushing the price lever upward.
Speed and cost aren’t the only draws. Solana’s single-shard architecture lets every smart contract and program see the same state at once, cutting the complexity of cross-chain bridges that have plagued rivals with hacks and downtime. If big-ticket real world asset (RWA) platforms or AI inference markets pick a chain for throughput reasons, Solana’s capacity to process 65,000 transactions per second (TPS) makes it a frontrunner.
Still, five years is plenty of time for potholes along the way. A hard regulatory crackdown on low-fee chains, a catastrophic validator outage, or Ethereum’s long-awaited darksharding upgrade could all erode Solana’s edge.
Macro shocks matter, too. If liquidity vanishes from the market, fee revenue will follow it down for both its apps and the network itself.
Even so, the core thesis is simple. Money talks.
When a chain out-earns everyone else for nine straight months, the market usually notices eventually. If Solana’s revenue keeps sprinting while its tokenomics quietly throttle supply, a triple-digit price tag starting with “5” is no stretch whatsoever over the next few years.
In fact, I predict that it’ll happen before 2030, because right now, its competitors simply can’t keep up with its main draws.
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Alex Carchidi has positions in Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Ethereum and Solana. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.
