- Solana makes a massive comeback with a 400 percent surge from the 2022 low, and 100 percent uptime this year.
- Ethereum is also maintaining its dominance with the highest number of actual users despite trailing behind Solana in daily activities.
The battle for supremacy between Solana (SOL) and Ethereum (ETH) reaches an interesting point as the former makes an incredible attempt to seize control from the latter.
Beyond doubt, Ethereum is supreme on all fronts, having proven itself with satisfactory uptime, reliability, security, price growth, etc. However, Solana is making a comeback from a series of challenges ranging from the FTX failure to a series of downtimes.
SOL has so far this year maintained a 100 percent uptime, motivating the aggressive accumulation of its tokens by investors to trigger a 400 percent price surge from last year’s low. Not just that, Solana has recorded a massive surge in Total Value Locked (TVL) in Decentralized Finance (DeFi), rising from $210 million at the start of the year to $415 million.
While this is termed as its highest point this year, it is nowhere near the $3 billion TVL recorded in 2021. The value is also far from Ethereum’s $24 billion figure. Analysts also rank Solana in the fifth position in terms of developer activity. Ethereum, Polkadot, and Cosmos are all ahead of Solana in this aspect.
This was highlighted in a post by BSC News.
What’s more, on a TVL basis, both @trondao and @BNBCHAIN have a better shot of rivaling the biggest smart contract L1. The same is true for developers.@ElectricCapital’s helpful dashboard can lend some clarity here. The latest figures do show Solana as the 5th most developed ecosystem. However, they also show Solana to be well behind a handful of top L1 networks including #Ethereum #Polkadot and #Cosmos, as well as still sitting some 50% lower than it was a year prior.
More on the Solana vs Ethereum Comparison
In terms of daily activities, Solana takes the lead with 15-20x more than those on Ethereum. However, that paints a blurred picture of the number of actual users. A close look at this shows that Ethereum has the highest number of actual users. The degree of dominance is very obvious when a small handful of layer 2 networks on Ethereum are added to the mix. In terms of the scale of activities, Ethereum emerges with higher numbers compared to Solana.
By this, we mean that even though fewer transactions may occur on Ethereum mainnet (owing to cost, speed, etc.), the value of those transactions is much higher, reflected in daily DEX volumes, etc.
Solana’s recent surge has been linked to rising institutional interest. Visa announced in September 2023 that it would add Solana as a settlement layer to improve “cross-border USDC stablecoin payments.” On top of that, e-commerce giant Shopify is also integrating the Solana Pay system in collaboration with MasterCard.
As of press time, SOL had surged by 23 percent in the last seven days, 9 percent in the last 24 hours, and 118 percent in the last 30 days to trade at $47.65. Ethereum (ETH) has also made a 9 percent surge in the last 24 hours, a 16 percent surge in the last seven days, and a 35 percent surge in the last 30 days to trade at $2,107.26.