Ecological comparison between Solana and Ethereum: daily activity, application scenarios, income and expenses

Author: E2M Research

Network data comparison

From the perspective of active user data, Ethereum ecological data shows that the daily activity of the main network is basically maintained at 400,000-500,000.

Looking at Layer 2, Base accounts for the vast majority, with about 1.5 million daily users. Immutable is about 300,000, Arbitrum is about 260,000, and OP is about 90,000. Adding all data to the mainnet, the daily activity is less than 3 million.

Solana's data will begin to grow significantly in 2024, typically finding bowling lanes, showing S-shaped growth. The current daily activity remains at around 5 million.

Judging from the daily active data, Solana's data has exceeded the Ethereum ecosystem, that is, 5 million versus 3 million.

This is also different from the previous round of BSC data boom. The BSC data boom still uses Ethereum's EVM architecture. It is essentially affected by the Ethereum architecture and cannot have a huge impact on the status of Ethereum. But Solana uses a completely different architecture, similar to Chimp Company, which hopes to establish its own standards. If a large number of users enter the Solana ecosystem, it will drive the project team to migrate to the Solana ecosystem.

Recent developments including PENGU issuing coins on Solana, DePin project and AI Agent are all more inclined to issue assets on Solana, and the issuance of assets will drive an increase in DEX trading volume. For this point, please refer to the comparison of mainstream DEX data:

There are slight differences in this data between several statistical platforms, but it does not affect the analysis. Taking defillama as an example, it can be seen that the Ethereum ecosystem and the Solana ecosystem are basically at the same level in terms of transaction volume.

In terms of fees, Solana is more dominant, mainly because meme transaction users are less sensitive to high handling fees.

Project revenue data

The following is the project ranking of the recent 24-hour revenue data. It can be seen that except for the stable coins Tether and Circle, the rest are mainly based on the Solana ecosystem. This data can be seen as an expensive signal, representing the user's willingness to pay for the product. It can be seen that projects in the Solana ecosystem are obviously more popular.

Another point worthy of attention is that the income of the public chain itself is not the highest. For example, Solana, Ethereum and Tron are all lower than the mainstream applications on the chain. This is a debate about fat protocols or fat applications, but at present Look, it seems like the app captures the value better.

The reason may be that the current applications of each chain are basically monopolized by a few applications. If the ecosystem develops to a larger scale, this phenomenon should weaken.

Fidelity Report

Fidelity Digital Currency 2025 Outlook Report also compared Ethereum and Solana.

The article states: The Rollup-Centric roadmap aims to expand Ethereum while maintaining the ease of use of the Layer 1 blockchain. Although the cost of Layer 1 has been significantly reduced after the Deneb-Cancun upgrade, the team still believes that although the revenue from the Blob market may not be able to make up for the revenue drop caused by the upgrade in the short term, in the long term, this change will bring positive network effects .

The relationship between Layer 2 and Ethereum is mutually beneficial and symbiotic, with Layer 2 benefiting from Ethereum by providing low-cost transaction execution and further expanding ETH.

The figure below shows the trend of blob quantity and blob cost.

Blob fees are seen as a long-term positive driver of Ethereum's network effects, especially helping Layer 2 attract more users to interact with ETH. This does not mean that Ethereum has completely given up on future cash flows. The most likely end goal, developers say, is that cash flow will develop naturally as network effects grow significantly.

Ethereum core developers point to low fees as a key factor driving Layer 2 user growth. It is expected that by 2025, there will be more Layer 2 solutions focusing on specific use cases. While Solana appears to have the advantage in the short term, Ethereum's fundamental strength may be more solid in the long term.

Ethereum tokens are expected to remain stable after the Deneb-Cancun upgrade, with annual inflation estimated at 0.22% in 2024. Ethereum's expansion plan aims to gradually increase the number of blobs. More blobs, combined with Layer 2 user demand, may cause the total fee of Ethereum to exceed the annual ETH issuance.

The chart below shows L1 fees and transaction volume. Data shows that although more transactions are conducted on L2, the transaction volume of L1 has not decreased compared with before the upgrade, even though L1 transaction fees have dropped significantly. This shows that even if Ethereum prioritizes L2 improvements, a large number of users still choose to use L1 for transactions.

think

The above considers the situation when the daily activity is 5 million. What needs to be considered is if the daily activity reaches 50 million or 500 million, who has a better chance?

In view of the different characteristics of the two, at a scale of 500 million daily active users, the two ecologies may present a "division of labor and cooperation" situation:

• Solana is more likely to become the main carrier layer for consumer applications, especially in high-frequency, low-value transaction scenarios such as games, social networking, and payments.

• Ethereum (and its L2 ecosystem) may dominate high-value transaction scenarios such as institutional-level services and complex financial applications.

Taken together, Solana may have greater advantages in purely consumer-level scenarios , due to its Web2-like user experience and high-performance features.

However, from the perspective of long-term ecological health and security, the Ethereum ecosystem, with its modular architecture and mature infrastructure, is more sustainable in supporting large-scale adoption . The most ideal development path may be for the two ecosystems to develop together in their respective areas of advantage and jointly promote the large-scale adoption of Web3. Of course, if the market grows 100 times, the value captured by ETH should be less than 100 times, and a large amount of the value will be captured by layer 2 and upper-layer applications.

Solana Founder’s Perspective

Although Ethereum does not have as many users as Solana, Apple mobile phones, for example, have a low share but have gained the greatest revenue. Is the same situation the same for Ethereum?

This is not currently the case. As can be seen from the previous analysis, Ethereum actually captures very little value on layer 2, while at the same time, the applications on the chain capture a large amount of value. If we look at it from a long-term perspective, that is, in a market of 500 million users, Ethereum may dominate high-value transaction scenarios such as institutional-level services and complex financial applications. This situation is similar to Apple's business model. A small but high-value transaction can generate greater economic value. As the Layer 2 ecosystem matures, Ethereum will further expand its competitiveness at various value levels. The income of public chains is more like paying based on space or bytes, rather than paying based on asset value. resulting in low profits. Upper-layer applications have more flexible charging methods and capture high value. However, through the expansion method of Ethereum, if there is a prosperous Layer 2 ecosystem in the future, it may be possible to reverse the problem of low captured value.

Referring to the orangutan game, Solana is more like a chimpanzee company. The chimpanzee company needs to find its own niche market. Now it is the meme publishing and trading market. Then it hopes that the orangutan will make mistakes or open up new markets that are in a tornado, such as AI agents. Consider investing in a chimp company only if it is poised to become a chimp company in the event of a new tornado storm. (Even if Solana succeeds, value is not necessarily sol captured.) The meme coin market is not a market for proprietary architectures with high migration costs.

With the development of wallets and support for multiple chains, the meme market does not rely heavily on the underlying public chain architecture. Ethereum has a firm foothold in the DeFi industry, which is the bowling lane of Ethereum. The migration cost of the DeFi industry is high, and Ethereum has an advantage in this regard. The stablecoin industry has high conversion costs, but its structure has nothing to do with the specific public chain. Bitcoin is a non-proprietary architecture with high switching costs. This means that the standards of the blockchain industry cannot copy those of Orangutan Game. Consensus seems to be the more important part, with strong network effects.

Solana has become a link that cannot be ignored in the blockchain. Almost mainstream cross-chain bridges and multi-chain wallets will give priority to the evm and solana chains. The blockchain is an open system, which may not be like the closed ecosystem of every application on the Internet. Value networks are interchangeable.

It does not have to be limited to one ecosystem. Users can speculate on memes on Solana and do DeFi on Ethereum. Full-chain wallets or chain abstractions may become a new point of contention, because full-chain wallets are the applications closest to users, and the private key management solutions around users, user data identity systems, and derived social relationship networks may be the focus of wallets. moat.

CM: This round of sol is a target worth betting on. Much like the previous round of Ethereum, sol needs to participate in this round of meme market. Solana has not considered the importance of decentralization. Solana has advantages in removing the impossible triangle of decentralization. In the long run, both have their own market advantages, but Ethereum is more irreplaceable. The next Solana may appear, but the next Ethereum is difficult.

dz: Bitcoin has no competitors in the value reserve market. Ethereum does not need to license the global financial market and serves as the underlying support of layer 2. Solana is still a meme casino and has low irreplaceability.