Author: Haotian

Recently, compared to the steady rise of ETH, SOL's performance has been somewhat lackluster. $4,300 vs $175, what secrets lie behind this price difference? My personal understanding is that at a deeper level, it is a silent battle over "who is the darling of institutions":

1) ETH has already obtained the "pass" to enter the traditional financial world—after the ETF approval, the cumulative net inflow has exceeded $10 billion, allowing off-exchange funds to enter compliantly, which is equivalent to opening a front door for institutions.

On the other hand, SOL's ETF application is still pending, and the current situation is that there is a lack of funding channels, directly affecting price performance. Of course, this can also be interpreted as SOL still having room for a rebound, after all, SOL's ETF is not completely hopeless; it just needs more time to go through the compliance process.

The key is that ETH's micro-strategy has already demonstrated a certain institutional FOMO effect under the purchasing power of U.S. listed companies like SharpLink and BitMine, which will drive more corporate treasury fund allocations, this will create a huge off-exchange funding momentum for ETH on Wall Street;

2) Currently, the scale difference in stablecoins between ETH and SOL is still stark, with data showing 137 B vs 11 B. Everyone must be puzzled—why, with American blue-blood genes and on-chain Nasdaq, is Solana lagging so severely in this round of stablecoin wars guided by U.S. stablecoin policies?

Actually, it’s not SOL's fault; behind this is the ultimate test of chain infrastructure decentralization, security, and liquidity depth. On Ethereum, USDC (65.5 billion), USDT, and DAI firmly control the stablecoin market, backed by the absolute trust of institutions like Circle and Tether in the Ethereum network.

Although the VCs behind SOL are all U.S. investors, the new institutions on Wall Street may not consider so much; they can just look at the stark data difference, which may be why SOL cannot bridge the data scale gap in the short term. However, objectively speaking, SOL's stablecoin growth rate is actually quite good, including PayPal's PYUSD choosing to focus on Solana, which provides a lot of room for imagination, but patience is still needed;

3) Once upon a time, SOL's on-chain economic vitality was off the charts, with daily trading volumes on PumpFun exceeding ten million dollars, and various MEME tokens flying everywhere. But the problem is, we are still in the accumulation phase of large institutions' chips, and big funds care more about "hard indicators" like compliance channels, liquidity depth, and security records, rather than how many MEMEs are on-chain in PVP.

In other words, it is not yet a narrative cycle dominated by retail investors; conversely, this on-chain vitality is precisely SOL's differentiated advantage. When the market cycle shifts and retail FOMO is reignited, the innovative gameplay and user base that SOL has accumulated may become the ignition point for the next wave of market trends;

4) As SBF's "favorite child," SOL may still be affected by the fallout from the FTX collapse, with the painful drop from $260 to $8 still fresh in memory. Although technically SOL has become completely independent, in the memory of institutions, this association is like a scar that will occasionally be brought up.

Moreover, being able to rise from $8 back to $175 itself proves the resilience of the SOL ecosystem. Those teams that continued to build during the darkest times have become the new force in reconstructing the Great Wall of public chains for SOL, and this experience of rebirth may be a good thing in the long run;

5) ETH follows a layer 2 stratification route, which, although criticized for liquidity fragmentation, precisely meets the risk isolation needs of institutions. In contrast, SOL's integrated high-performance route runs everything on a single chain, this "All in One" model is seen as concentrated risk in the eyes of institutions.

So you see, Robinhood's partnership with Arbitrum is an example; from an institutional perspective, ETH's high gas fees have become an advantage for filtering high-value transactions, even though it goes against mass adoption. But the current mainstream narrative is not about mass adoption; it’s a game of who can win the favor of Wall Street institutions;

6) Finally, it’s worth noting that there is a difference in the accumulation of time consensus; ETH has a 9-year history, while SOL has only 4 years. Although native projects like Jupiter and Jito have already demonstrated world-class product capabilities, there is still a gap in market education, ecological sedimentation, and trust accumulation compared to DeFi giants like Uniswap, AAVE, and MakerDAO.

In summary, the painful memories of E-Guardians may give rise to a wave of S-Guardians under a new market FOMO, but this contest, in my view, is essentially a phase mismatch between institutional narratives and retail narratives, nothing more. After all, ETH was not built in a day, and SOL's growth rate is actually quite remarkable.

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