Opinion: Alpenglow upgrade could lift Solana to $250 by year-end

Alpenglow aims to cut block confirmation time to a 150 ms median.

On 2 September the Solana community approved SIMD-0326, dubbed Alpenglow. Shawn Yang, chief analyst at MEXC Research, projected SOL could reach $250 by year-end, reported Decrypt. 

Voting began on 28 August. 98.94% of participants voted “for” the “most important upgrade in the network’s history”, 1.05% “against”. 0.36% abstained. 

The main aim of Alpenglow is to cut block confirmation time to 150 ms. That should markedly speed up transaction finality and the operation of decentralised applications.

According to Yang, the upgrade will put Solana ahead of other L1 blockchains and even outpace standard web search in speed. Such a breakthrough would significantly enhance the network’s appeal, he says. 

“Institutions and treasuries are starting to view SOL not as a speculative, highly volatile instrument, but as a long-term reserve or infrastructure asset,” the expert added. 

Public companies have already accumulated more than $1.7bn of Solana. The odds of an ETF based on the altcoin being approved continue to rise. Taken together, these factors could lift the price to $215 as soon as September and to $250 by year-end. 

“The forecast is based on two key factors: a structural supply shortage due to staking and steady institutional demand. Solana continues to cement its position as the most reliable non-Ethereum layer-1 blockchain for financial market infrastructure. While short-term growth may slow, the medium-term uptrend will persist,” Yang explained. 

At the time of writing the asset trades at $209. Over the past 24 hours its price has risen by 2.5%. 

Earlier, Bitget’s chief analyst Ryan Li forecast Solana would rise to $250–260 “amid strong ecosystem development and positive metrics”. 

“Meme coins on Solana are dead” 

Trader James Wynn, also known as the “Hyperliquid whale” and the self-proclaimed “king of perpetuals”, called Solana “a cesspool”. 

Solana is a cesspool.

IF I ever create a meme coin it will be on Ethereum.

Solana is saturated and full of jeets. Kids flipping $100 to $1,000. Fair play. But nobody cares about doing the impossible and taking a meme to Valhalla anymore.

Snipers galore. Farms galore.…

— Jwynn.eth (@JamesWynnReal) September 3, 2025

“If I ever decide to create a meme coin, I will definitely do it on Ethereum,” he said. 

According to Wynn, the ecosystem is “saturated and full” of speculators interested only in quick profit. 

“No one is interested in doing the impossible and taking coins to success. Snipers everywhere. Farms everywhere,” the trader added. 

He counts only Dogecoin, Shiba Inu and Pepe as “blue chips”. Everything else is pyramid schemes and “trash”, as Wynn put it. The Hyperliquid whale declared the culture of Solana-based meme coins dead. 

In July the project’s co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko called meme coins and NFTs “digital trash”. 

In late August the number of traders on Solana fell by 80% after a spate of rug pulls linked to “funny coins”. Yet even as overall activity waned, metrics for the Pump.fun meme-coin platform continue to rise.