(The following arguments are derived from Bybit’s submissions, with partial quotes from Bybit’s Director of Financial Products, Hao Yang)
(Another note from ABMedia: When quoting this view, eight Ethereum spot ETFs have been officially approved )
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ToggleHao Yang: Hope to obtain appropriate valuation from the market
Hao Yang, Bybit’s director of financial products, believes that ETH remains the most decentralized, tested and technically outstanding work of all time.
He said: “I hope that Ethereum can be appropriately valued as a result, especially considering that the Ethereum-based blockchain is expected to generate more than $4 billion in revenue this year, driven by the rising demand for NFTs and decentralized financial services. "
Hao Yang: ETH and SOL are not binary opposites
Hao Yang believes that speculators have been declaring the death of Ethereum on Twitter/X ever since Solana (SOL) started outperforming Ethereum. In fact, Solana has attracted significant inflows this year, shifting capital away from Ethereum, boosting its daily active user count to 30 million, compared with Ethereum’s 1 million at the time of writing.
However, the total value locked (TVL) – that is, the total amount of capital that exists in blockchain smart contracts – is $53.4 billion in Ethereum and only $4.4 billion in Solana. This reflects the different use cases: Solana is chosen for high-speed, low-cost transactions, while institutional investors still choose Ethereum.
From a retail user perspective, Solana is second to none in the cryptocurrency space in terms of smoothness of the application and simplicity of the interface, thus driving its popularity.
This is reflected in daily active user metrics – Solana grew 126% year-on-year, while Ethereum only grew 24% during the same period. This increase in interest and capital has fueled Solana's rapid growth, with exciting new products such as art/collectibles marketplace DRiP, exchange aggregator Jupiter, and numerous meme coins. Ethereum, by contrast, has struggled to find reasons to bring retail users back.
But this is a false dualism.
ETH remains the most historically sound and robust blockchain
Hao Yang said: “Personally, I like investing with ETH and SOL because they are optimized to capture different markets. Solana is so great for the reasons mentioned above, but ETH also has many advantages that make it Good for institutions, large transactions and well-known works of art.”
First of all, it has the longest history of any smart contract platform, so investors placing 57% of their smart contract capital on Ethereum is the best endorsement of confidence.
In comparison, the proportion using Solana is only 4.64%. Of course, this also needs to take into account that Ethereum has been online since 2015, while Solana was launched in 2020. Second, Ethereum has never experienced an outage, while Solana has experienced hours of outage and has struggled to cope with a surge in transaction volume this year, resulting in some transactions being stalled and delays lasting even two weeks.
If you were an institutional investor and wanted to deploy your product, would you choose ETH or SOL? Of course, real-time trading may be important to traders, but institutional investors should not be concerned about slightly longer settlement times because they are used to settlement times in traditional finance that can take up to two days.
While settlement times are extended, these investors gain the security of a wider distribution and proven network. They can even settle tokenized money market funds on a 24/7, 365-day basis based on client movements. In fact, due to its high stability, institutional investors such as BlackRock and Fidelity are already using Ethereum, which is sending a signal to the market that this is the preferred place for institutional investors to do business on the chain.
On the other hand, the growth of on-chain art is also becoming a comprehensive movement, and future art historians will point out that "that's when NFT was born." A group of emerging artists, such as XCOPY, Matt DeLaurier, and Jack Butcher, are selling 1/1 of their art on-chain at huge prices, all denominated in ETH.
ETH and SOL can prosper independently
It’s clear that ETH is the preferred choice of financial giants, institutional funds, and art collectors, while Solana is the darling of the retail market. They can prosper together. There is room for Rolex and Casio in the world, it doesn’t have to be black and white. Even if ETH is lagging behind Bitcoin and Solana at the moment, it does have a unique narrative and market positioning that will lead it to a prosperous future.
