Sygnum assessed the prospects of the competition between Ethereum and Solana

There are no compelling signs that Solana will surpass Ethereum as the preferred blockchain for institutions. This opinion was presented by experts from the Swiss crypto bank Sygnum.

According to the report, current sentiments around Ethereum "remain poor." The market is largely focused on "the high transaction volumes of Solana and its recent dominance in generating fees."

"Leaving aside the sentiments, we believe that the medium-term prospects will primarily be determined by the choice of platforms on which traditional financial institutions offer their products," said Sygnum.

According to experts, "security, stability, and durability" as well as a higher income speak in favor of Ethereum. In fact, the network outperforms Solana by almost 2.5 times in this indicator. The only exception was a short period related to the release of the TRUMP and MELANIA tokens by the Trump family.

"The market has always viewed Solana's revenues as less stable, as they are largely concentrated in the meme coin sector. And this will limit its superiority," emphasized Sygnum specialists.

Ethereum is facing criticism for stagnant on-chain activity on its base blockchain — the Dencun hard fork sharply reduced costs for L2 networks, where transaction volumes have shifted. This has led the market to consider ETH less valuable, experts say.

However, Solana faces a "comparable problem" in terms of tokenomics, they added. The blockchain is ahead of its competitor in generating fees at the first level, but most of the revenue goes to validators and does not increase the value of SOL.

"At the moment in Solana, it seems that they are not inclined to increase the value of the token, as the proposal to adjust the inflation rate, which would have a corresponding effect, was recently definitively rejected," the experts noted.

They indicated that Ethereum dominates the use cases popular among governments, regulators, and financial institutions: tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi.

The share of blockchain in the RWA segment reached 57%, while the L2 protocol ZKsync accounts for another 20%. The figure for Solana does not exceed 3%.

"Although the share of Ethereum in the stablecoin market has decreased since the beginning of the year, it still exceeds 50%, while Solana, although it has doubled its market share, still remains just above 5%," experts noted.

They considered the progress of Solana in decentralized finance to be the most convincing. In terms of TVL, the blockchain has increased its percentage in the segment from 9.5% to 11.5% since the beginning of the year. The figure for Ethereum decreased from 63.5% to 55%.

"So far, all the 'Ethereum killers' have failed to challenge the dominance of the network, and despite the fact that some of these projects have brought brilliant innovations addressing real issues such as scalability or interoperability, most of them have faded away by now," concluded Sygnum specialists.

Recall that in December 2024, Ethereum researcher Max Reznik stated that the project was "tired and burned out" and announced his departure to the Solana company Anza.

One of the main developers of Ethereum, Justin Drake, on the contrary, rejected the threat to blockchain positions from competitors like Solana.