Ethereum and Solana are laying the groundwork for the next wave of crypto adoption, with 2025 marking a year of consolidation focused on interoperability and real-world financial applications.
Ethereum’s Institutional Momentum and the Interoperability Push
Ethereum saw growing institutional adoption in 2025, alongside progress on scaling and a renewed focus on connecting its various layers.
- Institutional investors are increasingly drawn to Ethereum, fueled by the emergence of digital asset treasuries.
- Efforts to improve interoperability between Ethereum’s layers are gaining traction, aiming for a more unified DeFi experience.
- The focus is shifting from speculative cycles to tangible utility, with neobanking solutions leading the charge.
- Solana hardened its infrastructure after a busy start to the year, preparing for deeper financial use cases.
- The Alpenglow upgrade promises faster transaction finality and increased reliability for Solana.
Ethereum’s gains in 2025 have been largely driven by institutional adoption, including the rise of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, cofounder of ether.fi, a major restaking network, highlighted ongoing protocol improvements as key, noting the network is “making the Ethereum mainnet layer one more scalable,” with transactions already “super cheap now and will continue to get better.”
He added that improving layer-two interoperability— “making it easier to move assets across layer twos and Ethereum”—has been “exactly the right stuff to work on,” alongside efforts to attract institutional investors.
Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind Base’s largest decentralized exchange, Aerodrome, believes the next Ethereum upgrades represent a turning point after years of fragmentation. “In a word: unification,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent 5+ years making things cheaper and faster, but in doing fractured UX and fragmented liquidity. That’s about to end.”
Recent advancements in interoperability technology are setting the stage for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, with Cutler predicting that “2026 will be the year all of these siloed ecosystems come back together to create a lightning-fast, cost-efficient and truly interoperable experience for users and institutions alike.”
While ETFs have broadened access to ether, Silagadze argues they don’t fully expose investors to onchain economic activity. “The ETFs let you have access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or the earning opportunities,” he said, adding that DATs fill that gap. “I think that’s where the DATs come in… and I think it certainly had a positive impact on the price [of ETH], no question.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, the lowest point of the year, but rebounded to $4,832 by August as DATs gained traction. Currently, ETH trades around $3,000, according to CoinMarketCap.
Looking ahead to 2026, Silagadze, who focuses on neobank solutions at ether.fi, hopes Ethereum’s next phase will be defined by continued scaling and tangible utility, rather than speculative cycles. He believes real adoption will come from products that feel familiar to mainstream users but are built on crypto rails.
“I really believe that the intent is, or that the adoption is going to come from a lot of these crypto, neobank type players,” he said, pointing to financial services that combine self-custody, yield, and composability. For Silagadze, the shift requires moving beyond “gambling”-driven activity toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale, expanding access to services like tokenized equities and globally accessible banking tools.
Solana’s Infrastructure Hardening for 2026
After a volatile 2024, Solana appeared to stabilize in 2025. Activity peaked early in the year, driven largely by memecoin trading that tested the network’s limits.
“January was a really crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs, pointing to surging transaction volumes and high revenue for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped harden the network.
Compared to the previous year, Solana is now “super buttery smooth,” Bruder said, with faster performance and increased capacity. Block space increased roughly 25% in 2025, improving user experience and lowering fees, while a new wave of DeFi teams arrived “very energized to build on Solana.” Bruder argued this marked a year where Solana’s potential as a high-throughput financial network began to materialize.
“2025 was just crazy, like everyone was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” truly started to materialize.
For Jito, 2025 was defined by doubling down on infrastructure, focusing on BAM, a product designed to make transaction sequencing more transparent. The goal, Bruder said, was to “unlock new design spaces and new markets and new economies” by improving how transactions are ordered and priced. The payoff is straightforward: “better applications, better pricing for users, and a better user experience.”
A key inflection point for Solana is expected in 2026 with the rollout of Alpenglow, a long-anticipated upgrade to its consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, improving reliability and sharply reducing confirmation times. Currently, Solana transactions take 12 to 13 seconds to finalize; under Alpenglow, Bruder said, finalization could drop to around one second, making transactions almost immediately irreversible.
This shift has significant implications for high-stakes financial activity, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. By tightening finality guarantees and smoothing network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited for large markets, viewed as prerequisites for high-stakes financial activity. Bruder believes the upgrade is less about incremental gains and more about solidifying Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
