Although the Ethereum price has increased almost twice as fast as Solana in the last month, this superiority may not be permanent.
Solana has the potential for greater returns in the long term, according to Adrian Fritz, research director at Switzerland-based asset management firm 21Shares.
While Fritz acknowledged that Ethereum is the most secure and decentralized smart contract platform, he said that Solana, as a smaller project, has more room for growth. He noted that the developer community at Solana is constantly striving for better performance. “Ethereum was sitting on a throne, looking down on other Layer-2 projects. Because of this, they got a little lazy. Solana, on the other hand, is much more commercially focused,” Fritz said.
Fritz believes ETH, which ranks second in market capitalization, could reach a new all-time high this year, but it will fall well short of some analysts’ expectations of $10,000. In contrast, he predicts Solana will surge 89% from its current $178 to $337. Fritz noted that Solana is approaching “blue chip altcoin” status.
Robinhood’s plans to develop an Ethereum-based Layer-2 scaling solution are a significant development, demonstrating that traditional finance can embrace Ethereum as a global consensus layer. Meanwhile, Kraken’s development of tokenized stock products called “xStocks” on Solana is also a significant step for Solana.
While Fritz acknowledged that Solana has a more centralized structure compared to Ethereum, he stated that it is much more advantageous in terms of speed and transaction cost: “In transaction-oriented applications, many institutions tend to prefer Solana.”
However, Fritz stated that many traditional investors still don’t fully understand Solana, saying, “I still get a lot of people asking me, ‘Is it just for memecoins?’” According to Fritz, the intense activity on Solana, thanks to the memecoin launched in January in US President Donald Trump’s name, demonstrated that the network could become a serious global trading platform.
*This is not investment advice.
