Thanks to its cheap fees and nearly instantaneous transactions, Solana (SOL -0.21%) has a strong edge over its larger competitor Ethereum in the race to become the leading blockchain for developing artificial intelligence (AI) agents and related applications. It will likely capture a bigger helping of the market for such tokens during the coming year or so.
But is that enough to justify a $5,000 investment in the coin, or is it better to wait until conditions are a bit less volatile? Let’s answer that question by exploring exactly what it’s accomplishing and why it matters.
The tech stack here is clearly attracting investment
As you may have heard, artificial intelligence (AI) is all the rage these days, and, in particular, there’s a lot of interest in AI agents that are capable of initiating tasks and accomplishing them on their own without much human guidance or intervention aside from setting a high-level objective. For now, such agents are closer to prototypes or memes than they are to being useful workers that are deployable at scale.
But, in the near future, that will change. When it does, agents will need a way to store and disburse money and other resources. That way, they will have the ability to purchase anything that’s necessary to complete their tasks, and they will also be able to collect payments. On that front, they will also need a way to negotiate contracts with other agents, as well as with human entities. Solana is aiming to be the platform on which all of those activities occur, and it has a solid chance of getting there.
There are already a handful of AI infrastructure projects and AI agents operating on its chain. That means there are ways for agents to take key on-chain actions, like operating a wallet to invest in tokens, as well as integrating agents into operating things like social media or messaging applications. It’s only a matter of time before refinements make this segment of the market significantly more valuable.
But, as a result of Solana’s price decline of more than 44% during the past three months and a generally falling crypto market, the largest AI-related token, which is called Grass, on the Solana chain now is worth only about $303 million, whereas some AI agent tokens had valuations as high as $2.5 billion at the start of 2025. These valuations are likely to recover and be surpassed eventually, once developers create agents on the chain that are able to consistently generate value for coinholders. If, in the near future, agents become sophisticated enough to generate value for themselves or for other agents, it would be a huge catalyst.
This isn’t the only reason to invest
Right now, capturing some of the growth from the push toward AI agents is an important driver for Solana’s price. But it isn’t the only one, nor is its investment thesis contingent on winning in the AI market.
Remember, Solana has a ton of decentralized finance (DeFi) projects, non-fungible token (NFT) marketplaces, meme coins, and other crypto projects that contribute to it being one of the most valuable cryptocurrencies. There’s plenty of investor capital and developer talent on the chain, and there’s likely to be more in the future because there isn’t really a major chain where development and transactions are as cheap and easy.
In particular, so long as Ethereum remains more expensive, slower, and with a less organized technology development roadmap, Solana will likely attract some of the capital inflows related to AI as well as everything else, which will support a higher price. And while smaller chains might be even better than Solana on a technical basis, at least so far they haven’t been able to stop the its ascent.
So is Solana worth buying with $5,000 on the basis of its lead in AI agent development? For most investors, a single purchase would be a very aggressive move. The AI agent landscape is rapidly evolving, and that means making a big investment all in one go, expecting Solana to lead the industry, would be overcommitting to a good trend that hasn’t fully formed yet.
The better move is to set up a dollar-cost averaging (DCA) strategy with your Solana purchases. The more gradually you build up a position, and the longer you hold it, the less you’re liable to fall victim to the market’s gyrations, and the more time the coin’s inherent advantages will have to generate value and prove to the market that it’s the place for AI agent development on the blockchain.