An expert panel thinks red-hot Solana may cool off in the final two months of the year – but they are predicting a four-figure price target for the high-performance blockchain in four year’s time.

The Finder panel of 50 fintech specialists on average gave a US$1,178 price target for 2025 and a $5,056 estimate for 2030.

Their prediction for the end of the year was US$235, which SOL has already exceeded, on Friday changing hands for US$242. But experts were surveyed a few weeks ago, before Solana’s latest surge.

Solana tokens were trading for under US$2 at the start of the year, and sold during its March 2020 initial coin offering for just US22c. It’s now the No. 4 crypto, behind Binance Coin.

Origin Protocol co-founder Joshua Fraser predicted Solana coins would trade for around $250 at year-end.

“Solana will be the most prominent alternative to Ethereum and Ethereum layer 2s in hosting DeFi. This is a huge market to be captured and SOL price may reflect this,” he said.

Panxora Crypto general partner Gavin Smith was also bullish on the project.

“We think that SOL is one of a few smart contract-based blockchains that have the technical architecture that will be difficult for Ethereum to compete with on the basis of transaction speed and transaction cost. For smart contract usage, especially in DeFi, these factors are a critical success indicator.”

Cypherpunk Holdings chief operating officer Daniel Cawrey could even see Solana trading for $20,000 by 2030.

“It scales better than Ether and already has staking,” he said. (For those new to crypto, staking is a more energy-efficient and less inflationary way to validate transactions. Ethereum uses mining, but is scheduled to shift to a staking model next year).

Not all the experts surveyed were optimsitic about Solana, however.

The network went offline for 17 hours in September after what it described as a denial-of-service attack during a token offering on Raydium. The network was apparently overwhelmed by bots trying to buy all the tokens.

“The DDoS attack on Solana exposed the fact that a centralised group of actors can pause the blockchain, something that is really not commensurate with my beliefs about what a decentralised blockchain should be,” said Finder’s global cryptocurrency editor, Keegan Francis.

“Who is to say that an authority cannot demand the same to be done?”

Coinmama CEO Sagi Bakshi told Finder he has “no idea if Solana will survive, [n]othing at this point indicates that it will succeed”.

He predicted the coin would be USD$50 come 2030.

Read the full report here.

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