Matt Hougan, the chief investment officer at Bitwise Asset Management, said he thinks Solana could plausibly become a trillion-dollar asset within five yearsโan outcome that would roughly translate into a ~$1,600 SOL price on a simple market-cap-per-token basis, depending on circulating supply.
Hougan made the remarks on the Jan. 29 episode of When Shift Happens, framing his Solana view through what he called a โtwo ways to winโ setup: growth in the addressable market (stablecoins and tokenized assets), plus an increasing share captured by Solana versus competing networks.
Why Solana Could Hit $1,600+ Within 5 Years
Hougan argued that the โinfrastructure marketโ for stablecoins and tokenization is expanding quickly enough that large, liquid L1s should be valued less like niche crypto experiments and more like enabling rails for traditional finance. โThe US Secretary of Treasury expects the stablecoin market to 12x over the next four years,โ he said, adding that Larry Fink has described a future where โevery asset, every fund, ETF, stock, bond, real estate will be tokenized.โ
From there, his Solana thesis leaned heavily on relative positioning. Ethereum remains the incumbent in stablecoins and tokenization, Hougan said, but Solana is โa legit competitor with an interesting technological differentiation,โ and crucially โitโs extraordinarily easy to use and the community has a ship first attitude.โ
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That usability point, in his view, is underpriced by investors who focus on benchmark-style comparisons. โI think ease of use is a killer app thatโs underrated by investors,โ Hougan said. โInvestors like to talk about throughput and they like to talkโฆ TPSโฆ who cares about this? โฆFor an end user whoโs trading, whoโs on-ramping, ease of use is the killer app. And Solana is just easy to use, just dead easy to use.โ
Hougan also acknowledged a common investor blind spot: token supply dynamics can separate price action from market cap growth. He noted that Solanaโs market value can rise meaningfully even if the token price revisits prior highs, and suggested staking yield partially offsets dilution, citing โroughly like 7% a year.โ
Another thread in the discussion was how regulation shaped institutional behavior. Hougan said Solanaโs footprint in stablecoins and tokenization was constrained during the prior US regulatory environment, arguing that institutions โcouldnโt build on Solanaโ if they believed it sat โoutside of the regulatory perimeter.โ With that cloud lifting, he said, mandates are starting to broaden.
He also described why the ETF wrapper matters more for a smaller asset. โYou put a little bit of inflows into an ETF package and theyโre chasing a relatively small supply of Solana,โ Hougan said. โItโs one of the best setups for an asset that Iโve ever seen because you have this small constrained size, you have significant institutional demand, you have stablecoins and tokenizationโฆ you put all that together and it seems like a winner.โ
Still, he avoided hard price targets and instead stayed in market-cap terms. โIn 5 years I think it could be a trillion dollar asset. I think thatโs relatively easy to imagine,โ he said. โItโs hard to give a precise target because it depends on the pace of growth on stablecoins and tokenization. It depends on whether Congress passes the Clarity Act. It depends on the sort of crypto market cycles.โ
E156: @Matt_Hougan from @BitwiseInvest โ $6.5M Bitcoin and the strongest Solana setup ever?
This might be the most bullish yet rational episode weโve done on the future of crypto: why debasement, institutional flows & tokenization are just getting started.
Timestamps:
0:00โฆ pic.twitter.com/WMqvKL7pCj
โ MR SHIFT ๐ฆ (@KevinWSHPod) January 29, 2026
On simple market-cap math, a $1 trillion Solana valuation implies a four-figure token price depending on supply. The relationship is straightforward: token price equals market cap divided by supply. Using Solanaโs circulating supply of roughly 566 million SOL, a $1 trillion market cap works out to about $1,766 per SOL ($1,000,000,000,000 รท 566,000,000).
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If you instead use a fully diluted-style denominator closer to 619 million SOL, the same $1 trillion market cap implies roughly $1,615 per SOL ($1,000,000,000,000 รท 619,000,000). In other words, Houganโs โtrillion-dollar assetโ framing maps to something like the mid-$1,000s per token on todayโs supply assumptions, with the exact number moving as supply changes.
Notably, Houganโs Solana call sat alongside a broader macro narrative he returned to repeatedly: monetary debasement pushing investors toward scarce and non-sovereign stores of value. On Bitcoin, he argued the โtwo ways to winโ are the store-of-value market expanding and Bitcoin taking share from gold, an arc he said could drive multi-million-dollar BTC over decades if the last 10โ15 years of adoption trends persist.
For Solana, the equivalent is less about being โdigital goldโ and more about becoming a primary venue for stablecoin flows and tokenized securities. If those rails scale and if Solana continues gaining share as a high-velocity, institution-friendly network, Houganโs trillion-dollar scenario implies the market is still pricing the opportunity too conservatively.
At press time, SOL traded at $115.40.
Featured image created with DALL.E, chart from TradingView.com
