Bitwise Chief Investment Officer Matt Hougan is now applying his long-standing Bitcoin framework to Solana — and he’s calling the setup “explosive.”
Hougan sizes that “store of value” market at roughly $27.5 trillion today, including about $25 trillion in gold and $2.5 trillion in Bitcoin. He argues investors focus too much on Bitcoin replacing gold and not enough on the overall market itself expanding.
Hougan now argues Solana fits the same model. “When I invest in Solana, I am also making two bets at once,” he writes. Those two bets are: “1) The stablecoin and tokenization infrastructure market will grow. 2) Solana will win an increasing share of that market.”
For Hougan, that is the opening. He says he has “a lot of confidence that the stablecoin and tokenization infrastructure market will grow,” and argues most people “significantly underestimate how much these technologies will remake markets.”
His long-run claim is blunt: “Over time, I suspect nearly all payments will be in stablecoins and nearly all assets will be tokenized.” If that plays out, “the blockchains that facilitate this growth will be extremely valuable.” He calls it “easy to imagine this market growing by 10x or more.”
Hougan’s argument is that if the overall market for stablecoin settlement and tokenized assets 10xes, and Solana grows its share of that market from 14%, the result is not linear — it compounds. “If I’m right,” he writes, “the combination of a growing market and a growing share of that market will be explosive for Solana. Just as with bitcoin.”
He closes with a note on positioning. Crypto, he says, rewards humility because “even the most seasoned experts don’t know exactly how things will play out.” But he says you can still tilt odds in your favor by owning assets that embed two high-conviction bets at once. In his view, Bitcoin already fits that profile. Solana now does too.
At press time, SOL traded at $186.
