Annual Overview

Recently, the Solana official released its 2025 year-end summary. Against the backdrop of Bitcoin reaching $90,000 and traditional funds re-evaluating their allocation to crypto assets, it delivered a striking set of annual data: the on-chain DEX trading volume exceeded $1.7 trillion for the year, ranking second globally. Related ETFs achieved a cumulative net inflow of $766 million over 15 consecutive trading days, and the mainnet has maintained stable operation for nearly 700 days without any systemic failures. This set of data, on one hand, solidifies Solana's presence among high-performance public chains, reinforcing its narrative as an "Ethereum challenger." On the other hand, it sharply contrasts with the $782 million net outflow from Bitcoin spot ETFs in a single week (according to SoSoValue data). Funds are withdrawing from Bitcoin ETFs while increasing their positions in high-growth public chains and thematic products represented by Solana, reflecting a subtle shift in institutional risk appetite and track selection. The following sections will dissect Solana's current ecological position and the logic of capital migration from three perspectives: on-chain data, capital flow, and competitive landscape.

On-Chain Data

From the on-chain data perspective, Solana's most iconic metric this year is the DEX trading volume, which surpassed $1.7 trillion for the year, elevating it to the second tier globally according to public statistics. This indicates that its matching and clearing capabilities are accommodating higher frequency and higher value on-chain trading demands, making it substantially attractive to market makers and algorithmic strategy funds. Meanwhile, the Solana network has maintained nearly 700 days of continuous stable operation. Following previous frequent congestion and downtime controversies, this record sends a more "engineered" signal to developers and institutions: while maintaining high TPS and low public chain fees, the predictability of the infrastructure is improving. In comparison with Ethereum, Token Terminal data shows that Ethereum's contract deployment volume reached approximately 8.7 million in Q4 this year, sitting at a historical peak range. The market generally believes that "Ethereum's contract deployment activity is at a historical peak." This reflects structural differences in the activity levels of the two public chains: Solana's highlights are more concentrated in high-frequency trading and end-user interaction layers, while Ethereum's growth is mainly reflected in contract deployment, protocol layer innovation, and more complex financial logic, forming a multi-chain parallel foundation rather than a single public chain's "winner takes all."

Capital Flow

On the capital side, Solana-related ETFs recently achieved a cumulative net inflow of $766 million over 15 consecutive days, showing a relatively stable trend of buying rather than a single-day impulse purchase. This is typically interpreted in traditional financial products as a process of building or increasing medium to long-term allocations. In contrast, Bitcoin spot ETFs experienced a net outflow of $782 million in the same period. Matrixport analysis even pointed out that this round of Bitcoin ETF capital outflow may set a significant record since 2024: despite Bitcoin's spot price remaining above $90,000, ETF funds are clearly withdrawing, highlighting a structural shift in capital from "single Beta exposure" to high-growth narratives, public chain assets, and thematic products. In this process, multi-currency ETF products launched by platforms like Gate provide an important intermediary. These products often include various high-elasticity tokens, including Solana, in a single basket and maintain target weights through an automatic rebalancing mechanism, making institutions and high-net-worth funds more inclined to allocate through a combination rather than making extreme bets on a single token, thereby reducing volatility risk while indirectly amplifying the passive allocation pull effect on assets like Solana.

Comparison with Ethereum

In terms of market narrative, Solana has long been viewed as an "Ethereum challenger," with its selling points focused on hard metrics such as performance and fees: higher TPS and lower transaction costs to support a richer array of high-frequency trading, on-chain gaming, and social application scenarios. Meanwhile, Ethereum recorded approximately 8.7 million contract deployments in Q4, coupled with the fact that leading DeFi protocols like Aave heavily rely on ETH deposits to generate income, continuing to hold its core hub position in DeFi cash flow and collateral assets. In this landscape, the historical peak in ETH contract deployment activity reflects the prosperity of protocol layer and financial structure innovation; Solana, on the other hand, is thickening its differentiated ecosystem in high concurrency and high throughput, attracting applications and institutional funds that are highly sensitive to execution efficiency. It is worth noting that the figures circulating in the community, such as "Ethereum L1 + L2 monthly active users exceeding 25 million" and "Solana protocol revenue of $1.3 billion," are still marked as unverified or missing data by some research institutions, lacking a unified authoritative standard. In the absence of reliable multi-chain revenue, user, and retention data, overly relying on a single metric for "victory judgment" can be misleading. Investors should evaluate the Solana and Ethereum ecosystems based on verified data and clear use cases rather than being swayed by simple traffic or revenue rankings.

RWA and Assets

In the narrative of Real World Assets (RWA), a specific data point disclosed by Solana this year is that the on-chain tokenized stock scale has reached approximately $185 million. This volume, while still a niche market compared to the overall crypto market cap, constitutes a noteworthy asset category within a single public chain, catering to the on-chain demand for off-market equity and traditional financial assets. On a broader macro level, according to some sources, the total market cap of tokenized commodities has approached $4 billion, indicating that the RWA track is overall transitioning from concept validation to scale expansion, with continuous attempts to bring commodities, bonds, and equities on-chain. With its high performance and low fee technical characteristics, Solana has certain advantages in the trading layer and user experience of RWA, with opportunities to accommodate high-frequency trading of underlying assets, fragmented assets, and retail-oriented segmented products. However, the main battlefield for RWA still largely concentrates on more mature public chains like Ethereum, due to their longer accumulation in regulatory compliance, fiat on-ramps and off-ramps, institutional connections, and liquidity depth. For Solana, how to maintain execution efficiency while addressing compliance, custody, and clearing institutional aspects will determine whether it can transition from a "performance alternative" to a "core hub" in the RWA track.

Institutional Strategy

When Bitcoin prices are running high above $90,000, yet a significant net outflow is observed at the ETF level, the logic of institutional behavior becomes a focal point for market observation. One possible path is that some institutions, after completing their foundational allocation to Bitcoin as a "digital gold" asset, begin to shift from passive BTC exposure to multi-chain public chain assets and RWA themes, seeking a higher risk-reward ratio within the same risk budget; this is reflected in the sustained net inflow of $766 million into Solana ETFs over 15 days. Meanwhile, Solana's official expectations for 2026 propose "faster and stronger" performance, hinting at further upgrade plans in throughput, latency, and reliability. For institutional trading departments and market-making institutions that are highly sensitive to settlement efficiency and order execution speed, such performance commitments correspond to lower slippage, fewer interruption risks, and scalable expansion strategies. On the product level, the parallel existence of multi-currency ETFs and Solana single-theme ETFs also indicates that institutions prefer to dilute the volatility of a single asset through combination allocation, covering Bitcoin, Ethereum, Solana, and RWA-related tokens in a single basket, supplemented by an automatic rebalancing mechanism to dynamically adjust weights. This model neither abandons "core collateral assets" like BTC nor misses out on the incremental gains from high-growth public chains and new narratives.

Outlook for 2026

Looking back at 2025, Solana's phased achievements in trading volume, network stability, and RWA exploration are already clearly visible: the $1.7 trillion DEX trading volume firmly secures its position as the second globally, with high-frequency trading and user-side interactions being active; nearly 700 days of stable operation have alleviated market concerns about its "prone to downtime"; and the $185 million scale of tokenized stocks has sown seeds for its RWA niche track. However, aspects such as protocol revenue structure, user retention, and the gap with Ethereum in DeFi cash flow still have incomplete data, and shortcomings and uncertainties also exist. Whether the outflow of Bitcoin ETF funds and the net inflow of Solana-related ETFs constitute a medium to long-term capital migration rather than a one-time style rotation currently lacks cross-year holding and redemption data verification, presenting more as preliminary signs of "diversification from a single large-cap Beta to multi-chain and thematic assets." Looking ahead to 2026, the competition between Solana and Ethereum in performance, public chain ecological depth, and RWA regulatory adaptation will become more multifaceted: one side emphasizes execution efficiency and user experience, while the other continues to thicken its moat in security, compliance connections, and financial structure innovation. For observers, several key indicators are worth continuous tracking: changes in the scale of Solana ETFs held by institutions and multi-currency basket products; active users and transaction counts of on-chain high-frequency applications; actual issuance and clearing amounts of RWA assets on Solana; and whether Solana can deliver on its "faster and stronger" technical roadmap without sacrificing stability.

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