NEW YORK, Feb 9, 2026, 06:08 EST
- SOL lost roughly 4%, slipping to around $83 as leveraged futures bets pulled back and liquidations edged up.
- Nasdaq.com columns threw out a broad possible range for SOL—down to $20 if legal trouble hits, but as high as $250 if trading activity and inflows come back.
- Bulls are making the case for Solana to move from meme-coin fee reliance to stablecoin payments instead.
Solana’s SOL hovered near $83.21 Monday, dropping 4.27% in the last 24 hours, according to CoinGlass. Futures open interest clocked in close to $5.14 billion. Trading volume for Solana futures totaled about $10.0 billion, with liquidations reaching approximately $14.2 million over the same period, the data showed. 1
Motley Fool’s Alex Carchidi, writing for Nasdaq.com, mapped out a strikingly broad forecast for Solana over the coming year—anywhere from $20 up to $250. That low-end target? It’s all about a class-action lawsuit zeroing in on Pump.fun, a meme-coin launchpad built on Solana. The complaint later roped in Solana Labs and the Solana Foundation as well, according to the piece. No ruling yet, of course, and, as the column noted, traders tend to price in potential legal blowback before any facts are established. Carchidi called out around $7.2 billion locked in DeFi apps and $13.4 billion in stablecoins on the network. “My base case is that the coin will dip a bit lower for the next few months, then recover,” he wrote, with Solana possibly climbing back above $120. 2
Motley Fool’s Dominic Basulto, writing for Nasdaq.com, sees a path for SOL to hit $250 this year, and if things break right—a staggering $2,000 by 2030. That hinges on Solana steering away from meme coins, those hype-driven, joke tokens that still generate about half the ecosystem’s revenue by some calculations. Basulto, referencing Standard Chartered research, pointed instead to what he called a “micro-sized” stablecoin payments market—an area where Solana would go head-to-head with Ethereum. He flagged potential tailwinds too: “treasury” firms scooping up SOL for their balance sheets and the emergence of spot Solana ETFs. 3
The split here is important—it’s not just sentiment bouncing a coin around. Solana’s valuation is pulling double duty: it’s seen as a speedy, cheap platform for actual transactions, and also as a hotbed for meme-coin speculation. Those are fundamentally separate business models.
Stablecoins aim for a fixed value, most often tracking the U.S. dollar, and serve as a backbone for on-chain trading and payments. DeFi’s “total value locked” figure gives a ballpark sense of user capital in those apps—funds that can shift quickly if confidence wavers.
SOL hasn’t been the only one hit. Back on Feb. 5, Sherwood News flagged Solana slipping below $84, marking its lowest point since January 2024. Dogecoin, too, hovered near $0.09, territory it hadn’t revisited since September 2024. 4
Basulto’s point about ETFs isn’t just theory—there’s real-world action behind it. Bitwise rolled out its Solana staking ETF to the market on Oct. 28, 2025. CEO Hunter Horsley summed up the appeal: “Investors like growth potential, and investors like staking rewards.” In staking, token holders lock up their coins, backing the blockchain and signing off on transactions, earning rewards for their trouble. 5
The legal threat looms largest, and it’s tough to call. Should the Pump.fun case expand or regulators decide to clamp down harder on meme-coin platforms, what once counted as “adoption” could vanish in a hurry—taking fee revenue with it.
Traders are eyeing the pullback, trying to gauge if it’s simply squeezing out excess leverage or beginning to drive genuine users and developers toward rival chains. On price charts, these scenarios can appear nearly identical—though in reality, they’re not.
