In the bull market cycle of 2020, many public chains have high-profile declared themselves as "Ethereum killers", trying to surpass Ethereum in public chains and low-level technologies. However, as the bull-bear conversion cycle progresses, Ethereum still maintains its leadership position in the blockchain world, with a market capitalization of US$300 billion, firmly ranking second. The current market value of Solana is US$70 billion, which is only a quarter of Ethereum.
Even so, Solana’s performance during the bear market and recently has been remarkable, not only launching multiple innovative projects and features, but also having a profound impact on the entire cryptocurrency market. Different voices began to appear in the cryptocurrency community, discussing whether Solana might challenge Ethereum again in this bull market cycle and become the real "Ethereum killer."
Looking at the performance of major public chains in 2024, Solana has indeed performed well. It not only promoted the meme currency track, but also launched well-known projects such as pump.fun, Jito, and Jupiter. In addition, Solana also released a series of its own tools (such as Solana Actions and Solana Blinks), which triggered widespread discussion. In comparison, the performance of the Ethereum mainnet in the past six months has been relatively dull. Although the updates of The Merge’s conversion mechanism, Rollups integration (EIP-4844) and NFT tokenization (ERC-404) have caused a craze, these The heat didn't last. Nonetheless, I think Solana will indeed be able to further solidify its influence on the blockchain in the coming bull run, but it is still some way off compared to Ethereum. Next, I will analyze Solana’s positioning in this bull market cycle from different aspects.
Number of users and overall transaction performance of the blockchain
The most direct way to measure whether a public chain can attract users is to observe its number of users, wallet addresses, transaction volume and revenue. In this regard, I think Solana performs better than Ethereum.
As can be seen from the data, the number of users of both Solana and Ethereum is showing an upward trend. Although Solana has not yet surpassed the total number of users of the Ethereum mainnet and its L2, this is mainly due to the strong performance of Ethereum L2 (such as Base and Blast etc.) has promoted the user growth of the Ethereum mainnet. If only the Ethereum mainnet is considered, Solana's performance is significantly better than that of the Ethereum mainnet.
In terms of income, Solana's performance far exceeds that of Ethereum. Even if the income of Ethereum and its L2 is added together, it is still far lower than Solana's performance, with an average of 5-6 times higher, showing Solana's strong ability to attract money.
From the perspective of transaction volume, Solana’s average transaction volume in the past six months is about 2 billion per day, while Ethereum’s is about 1.3-1.5 billion. It can be seen that Solana’s blockchain performance has gradually surpassed Ethereum. Although Solana has surpassed the Ethereum mainnet in terms of number of users, transaction volume and revenue, the gap between it and Ethereum is still there. I think the answer can be found in the user's usage level and approach.
Lock-up volume and basic data performance
Although Solana has surpassed Ethereum in many data, there is still a significant gap between Solana and Ethereum in terms of the most basic data performance.
It can be seen from TVL (locked position) that Ethereum’s TVL far exceeds Solana at any time. Especially in the past six months due to the support of the Restaking track, Ethereum’s TVL has further improved. In this regard, Solana cannot match Ethereum. This also reflects that despite Solana's strong performance in the past half year, users lack confidence in Solana staking and would rather invest in the more stable Ethereum, so they have not invested significantly in resources. On Solana.
In addition, in terms of DEX (decentralized exchange) performance, although Solana’s DeFi ecosystem is gradually rising, users still prefer to use the Ethereum ecosystem for DeFi compared to Ethereum.
When comparing Solana's largest DEX - Raydium and Ethereum's largest DEX - Uniswap, you can see that Uniswap's Swap Price far exceeds Solana's performance. This shows that Solana’s performance in DeFi is still significantly surpassed by Ethereum, which is one of the important reasons why Solana has not yet surpassed Ethereum.
in conclusion
Solana has undoubtedly brought new vitality to the entire cryptocurrency market, promoting the development of the entire ecosystem and triggering different narratives. However, Solana still lags far behind Ethereum when it comes to total funding, showing that users prefer to view Solana as a platform for transactions and narratives rather than as a long-term investment option. Solana's recent outstanding performance mainly comes from the grasp of narrative and short-term hype. If it wants to become a real "Ethereum killer", I think Solana needs to invest more energy in DeFi in order to shake the status of Ethereum.
Although Ethereum’s recent data performance has declined compared to the past, and was even described as “60% dead” by OX.FUN founder Zhu Su, I think this is mainly due to the rise of Ethereum’s second-layer public chain and its current Influenced by the development of Ethereum’s blueprint. Ethereum is currently focusing on improving the underlying technology, resulting in poor performance in promoting the ecosystem and applications. When these underlying technologies are improved, I believe that the focus of Ethereum will shift and bring another peak to the Ethereum ecosystem and projects, not to mention the passage of the Ethereum ETF. A large amount of funds have not yet fully flowed into Ethereum. Therefore, I still adopt an optimistic attitude towards the future development of Ethereum.
In summary, Solana still has a way to go before it can become an “Ethereum killer.” Perhaps this problem can be solved after Solana launches an ETF. What Solana currently lacks is capital inflows and wider DeFi participation. If these problems can be solved, Solana’s future will be even more worth looking forward to.
