Solana(CRYPTO: SOL) will probably be a much bigger network in five years, and it might be a better investment than Ethereum(CRYPTO: ETH), too. However, it'll still need to make major changes to remain competitive by late 2031.

Here's what's likely to happen between now and then.

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Tokenization could be the whole ball game

For the uninitiated, tokenization is simply a technical term for recording a real asset's ownership data as a blockchain token, allowing the asset to be managed and traded on a crypto network.

According to a report by the CitiInstitute, by 2030, that organization's base case calls for 3% of all U.S. public equities to be tokenized. Citi puts that at $2.6 trillion in tokenized U.S. stocks by 2030. Today, there are only $2.6 billion in tradeable tokenized stocks, so there's very likely to be a tremendous amount of capital onboarding to various blockchains via tokenization over the next handful of years, and capturing only a sliver could be enough to make a coin grow by multiples.

And Solana is currently positioned to capture a lot of that growth, not just a sliver.

As of Sept. 3, the network held $503.1 million in tokenized equities, up from $56.9 million a year prior, and currently has a market share of 19.3% in the segment, up slightly from 18.2% at the same point in 2025. It's a natural home for tokenized trading activity thanks to its rapid transaction settlement times, often on the order of a fraction of a second, and its low transaction costs, typically under a penny.

There's more than one domain of competition

If Solana can continue to onboard more tokenized capital as well as be one of the leading places where tokenized stocks change hands -- its decentralized exchanges saw around 95% of the trading volume of the entire asset class in Q2 of this year, though that proportion has since decreased significantly -- its price will probably be dramatically higher in just a few years.

To become worth more than Ethereum, however, it'll also need to chip away at that network's lead in terms of its base of other tokenized assets as well as its base of parked stablecoins, not to mention fending off other competitors vying for the same pie. Of the $38.6 billion in tokenized assets, on Sept. 3, Ethereum held a 45% share and Solana 10.5%, so there's still a large gap to close.