Solana trades at 98.88 dollars. Its high was 293.31 on 19 January 2025, so it is 66 percent below it. Source: CoinGecko, read 3 September 2026. Any bull case that does not open with that number is selling something.
Here is the case anyway, and then the case against it at the same weight.
The Supply Schedule Just Got Steeper
On 28 August 2026, SIMD-0550 passed with 67 percent of participating stake. It doubled the annual disinflation rate from 15 percent to 30 percent, and the estimate attached to it is 18.9 million SOL of issuance removed over six years.
Inflation is 3.666 percent today against 8 percent at genesis, and the terminal rate is 1.5 percent. Half of every transaction fee is burned, with the other half going to the validator that processed it. Source: Solana Compass and the Solana fee documentation.
That is not a marketing change. It is holders voting to be diluted more slowly, which is the rarest vote in this industry because it costs the people casting it nothing today and pays them nothing today either.
The Speed Number Is About To Change
Slot time measured about 0.318 seconds on 1 September 2026. Alpenglow begins activating on mainnet on 28 September 2026, targeting roughly 150 milliseconds to finality, rolling out across epoch boundaries into October. Source: CryptoTicker, 1 September 2026.
Worth being precise, because most coverage is not: a block landing is not the same as a transaction being final. Today those are different numbers. Alpenglow is the upgrade that closes the gap, and it is not live yet.
And The Chain Is Actually Being Used
Memecoins run 42 percent of Solana DEX volume, on 1.178 billion dollars traded in a day and roughly 50.3 billion over thirty days as at late July 2026. Pump.fun alone contributed about 492 million of that daily figure. Source: Cryptobriefing, 27 July 2026.
Fees are 5,000 lamports per signature, 0.000005 SOL, fixed by the protocol rather than by the market. Cheap enough that turnover of that size is possible at all.
The Case Against, Which Is Not Small
Decentralisation is going the wrong way. Solana has 675 validators and a Nakamoto coefficient of 18. In March 2023 it had 2,560 validators and a coefficient of 31. Operators leaving have said the economics stopped working, with large validators charging zero percent fees making small ones unviable. Sources: Chainspect, 4 September 2026, and Solana Compass reported by Cointelegraph, 29 January 2026.
The usage number and the memecoin number are the same number. Forty two percent of DEX volume being memecoins is the bull case and the risk in one sentence. It is real activity paying real fees, and it is the most cyclical activity on any chain.
The chain has stopped. Four full outages between September 2021 and October 2022. That record is on the Solana page on this site with the durations, because a page that prints a throughput claim and omits the liveness record is an advertisement.
What The Position Actually Is
I hold Solana. It is one of six sleeves in the book and it is not the largest. The supply change is the part I find most interesting, because it is the only one of these arguments that does not depend on attention continuing to arrive.
Everything else here does.
Disclosure
I am not a licensed financial advisor and nothing here is a recommendation. Every figure carries its source and the date it was read. Prices, flows and fee run rates move, and this page is not updated when they do. I hold Solana and a token from one Solana NFT collection. The full disclaimer is at codywise.io/legal/disclaimer.
