Can Ethereum hold its crown as DeFi shifts towards Solana?

Ethereum remains the most consequential blockchain ever built. It introduced programmable money, anchored the decentralized finance (DeFi) sector, and serves as the primary venue for the world’s most secure smart contracts.

By legacy measures, its dominance is undisputed because it holds the deepest developer ecosystem, the largest pool of locked capital, and plays a central role in the settlement of regulated stablecoins.

However, technological irrelevance rarely arrives as a sudden collapse. It creeps in quietly, masked by metrics that describe where the market has been rather than where it is going.

The phrase “we still have TVL” (Total Value Locked) has become shorthand for this tension among Ethereum insiders. While TVL historically defined success, it increasingly measures assets that are parked as collateral rather than capital in motion.

The concern now emerging is that the ecosystem is leaning on these legacy metrics while the actual velocity of money shifts elsewhere. Whether that distinction matters by 2030 is now the industry’s central question.

The data divergence

The “flippening” narrative has returned, but this time it is driven by activity rather than market cap. The data paints a stark picture of divergence.

According to Nansen, Ethereum’s annualized revenue has dropped roughly 76% year over year to about $604 million.

The decline follows the network’s Dencun and Fusaka upgrade, which sharply reduced fees paid by Layer 2 networks.

In contrast, Solana generated approximately $657 million over the same period, while TRON captured nearly $601 million, driven almost entirely by stablecoin velocity in emerging markets.

The split is even sharper when viewed through the lens of Artemis data, which captures user behavior rather than just capital depth. In 2025, Solana processed roughly 98 million monthly active users and 34 billion transactions, exceeding Ethereum across almost every high-frequency category.

Alex Svanevik, CEO of Nansen, notes that dismissing these metrics fosters dangerous complacency. He has warned that Ethereum “needs to be paranoid” about unfavorable data even if TVL remains high.

In his view, the challenge is not just competition, but also the temptation to defend leadership by using indicators that become less relevant as crypto’s primary use cases shift.

However, a critical examination requires nuance. While the Artemis numbers show Solana winning the “volume war,” Ethereum is fighting a different battle: the war for Economic Density.

A significant portion of Solana’s 34 billion transactions consists of arbitrage bots and consensus messages. This activity generates substantial volume but arguably delivers less economic value per byte than Ethereum’s higher-stakes settlement flows.

As a result, the market is effectively bifurcating, with Solana becoming the “NASDAQ” of high-velocity execution, while Ethereum remains the “FedWire” of final settlement.

The crisis of urgency

Yet, explaining away the competition as “spam” risks missing the deeper cultural shift. The threat to Ethereum is not just that users are leaving, but that the urgency to keep them was lost years ago.

Kyle Samani, managing partner at Multicoin Capital, crystallized this sentiment in a reflection on his exit from the ecosystem.

He pointed out that his ETH conviction broke at Devcon3 in Cancun in November 2017. He noted:

This observation that the platform lacked the “wartime” speed required to capture mass adoption frames the current “MySpace” risk. MySpace didn’t vanish because it lacked users; it lost primacy when engagement shifted to platforms that offered a smoother experience.

For Ethereum, this “smooth experience” was supposed to be delivered by Layer 2 rollups (L2s) like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.

While this has been successful in lowering fees, this “modular” roadmap has created a fragmented user experience.

Furthermore, as liquidity spreads across disjointed rollups and L2s pay significantly less “rent” to Ethereum for data storage, the direct economic link between user activity and ETH value accrual has weakened.

The risk is that Ethereum remains the secure base layer, but the profit margins and brand loyalty accrue entirely to the L2s above it.

The pivot to accelerationism

Against that backdrop, the Ethereum Foundation has begun to adjust its operating posture.

The long-held emphasis on protocol “ossification,” the idea that Ethereum should change as little as possible, has softened since early 2025, as development priorities have shifted toward faster iteration and performance improvements.

A significant leadership cemented this shift in restructuring. The appointment of Tomasz Stańczak, founder of the client engineering firm Nethermind, alongside Hsiao-Wei Wang to Executive Director roles, signaled a move toward engineering urgency.

The technical manifestation of this new leadership is the Pectra and Fusaka upgrade shipped this year.

At the same time, the “Beam Chain” roadmap, championed by EF researcher Justin Drake, proposes a massive overhaul of the consensus layer, targeting 4-second slot times and single-slot finality.

This suggests Ethereum is finally attempting to answer the scaling question on the main layer. The goal is to compete directly with the performance of integrated chains like Solana without sacrificing the decentralization that makes ETH a pristine collateral asset.

This represents a high-stakes gamble of trying to upgrade a $400 billion network in flight. However, the leadership appears to have calculated that the risk of execution failure is now lower than the risk of market stagnation.

The final verdict

The “we still have TVL” defense is a backward-looking comfort blanket. In financial markets, liquidity is mercenary. It stays where it is treated best.

Ethereum’s bull case remains credible, but it is contingent on execution. If the “Beam Chain” upgrades can be delivered quickly and the L2 ecosystem can resolve its fragmentation issues to present a unified front, Ethereum can consolidate its position as the global settlement layer.

However, if usage continues to compound on high-velocity chains while Ethereum relies solely on its role as a collateral warehouse, it faces a future where it is systemically important but commercially secondary.

By 2030, the market will likely care less about the “history” of smart contracts and more about invisible, frictionless infrastructure.

So, the coming years will test whether Ethereum can remain the default choice for that infrastructure, or merely a specialized component of it.