If you had foresight and iron discipline, it was quite the good investment.
If you catch an asset early in its adoption curve, you don’t need to be perfect to do really well. On that note, five years ago, Solana (SOL -3.61%) was a fledgling smart contract network with more ambition than market share. Had you invested $1,000 then, it would be worth roughly $55,000 on August 27, 2025, or around 5,620% more than what you started with.
That kind of growth, despite skepticism and severe setbacks, is why investors pay attention to the Solana blockchain today. Let’s break down its path and examine its future prospects.
Image source: Getty Images.
The last five years were amazing for investors — but extremely difficult too
Today, Solana trades a little above $204 per coin. On Aug. 27, 2020, just shortly after its mainnet beta went live in early 2020, its price was about $3.44.
The price action over the last five years was not a straight line upward. In fact, as coins go, this one was an extremely difficult investment to hold. Most investors probably would have cracked and sold their coins at one moment in particular.
The FTX bankruptcy hit in November 2022, obliterating all positive sentiment in the crypto sector overnight, and sharply disrupting the supply dynamics around coins associated with the exchange.
Solana was especially hard hit because FTX was heavily promoting it, and owned a stake equivalent to roughly 10% of its total market cap at the time. The exchange had also issued wrapped tokens on the chain, which many users and decentralized finance (DeFi) projects were using as collateral. When the assets backing those tokens were revealed to be missing, they went to zero and took down a significant portion of the Solana ecosystem on the way.
Between the end of November 2021 and a year later, Solana lost 93% of its value.
Even so, by January 2025, Solana’s DeFi total value locked (TVL) had pushed back above $10 billion for the first time since before the collapse, a sign that builders and users had returned.
But why did capital come back after seeing the coin’s value evaporate nearly overnight?
The chain’s core pitch to investors, users, and developers remains its high throughput and low fees, which are both significant advantages for consumer-facing activity. Recent usage data supports that reality, with millions of daily active wallet addresses and tens of millions of daily transactions at periods of peak demand.
Will the next five years rhyme?
Solana’s near-term upside will likely be driven by where it already shows product-market fit. But don’t expect a repeat of its past bull run.
Start with DeFi and non-fungible tokens (NFTs). Even after the 2022 to 2023 crypto winter, NFT sales on Solana have remained active. For 2024 as a whole, Solana ranked third in NFT sales at roughly $1.4 billion, an indication that participation persisted through the broader recovery.
But the bigger story is probably in the rise of a certain kind of fungible crypto token: tokenized stocks.
Such assets are simply stocks that are tracked and traded on the blockchain instead of on the traditional markets. Currently, there’s nearly $500 million in value stored on the chain’s tokenized equities. If the asset tokenization trend continues, and it probably will, that sum could balloon significantly over the coming years, attracting a lot of new value to the chain and generating revenue for the network when investors trade their tokenized stocks.
Another new catalyst is the emergence of on-chain AI agents, small programs that can reason over tasks and transact with decentralized applications (dApps) or smart contracts on a user’s behalf. If agent-mediated activity scales, Solana is well placed to capture it. There’s not much hope for the emerging AI agent segment to power the same scale of returns that Solana experienced over the last five years, but it could still make the coin’s value increase substantially if it takes off.
So, is it worth buying some Solana and holding it for the next five years? Absolutely. Just keep your expectations in check, and be aware that it’s very possible for the coin to experience another wild ride like it has since 2020.