If you bought 10w SOL and 10w ETH and exited at the peak of this bull market, who do you think would come out on top? 🔥🔥
ETH is stable, SOL is weak. This isn't just a price differential; it's also a vote of institutional investors. Who is the true favorite? Here's my personal take 👇👇
1. ETH has gained a traditional financial passport – ETFs have seen cumulative net inflows exceeding $10B USD, opening up compliance channels and attracting a steady stream of institutional capital. SOL's ETF remains pending, and this gap in funding channels is directly dragging down prices.
More importantly, US-listed companies like MicroStrategy have already taken the lead in allocating ETH, creating a FOMO (Fear of Momentum) effect for institutions and increasing momentum in Wall Street's OTC market.
2. ETH's stablecoin market size is $137B, while SOL's is only $11B. This is driven by the unwavering trust of the Ethereum troika of USDC, USDT, and DAI. While SOL is backed by US VCs, Wall Street focuses solely on real-world data, making it difficult to bridge the gap in the short term.
3. SOL was once renowned for its explosive on-chain economic vitality, with PumpFun's daily trading volume exceeding $10 million and MEME scams rife. However, institutions are currently prioritizing hard metrics like compliance, liquidity, and security, and the on-chain PVP narrative has yet to gain traction.
4. As the "son of SBF," SOL is still reeling from the FTX collapse, leaving a scar in institutional memory that's difficult to erase. However, its surge from $8 to $175 demonstrates the ecosystem's resilience. The team, persevering in the shadows, is rebuilding SOL's public blockchain.
5. ETH's Layer 2 approach, while criticized for fragmented liquidity, meets institutional risk isolation needs. Institutions, however, perceive SOL's integrated, high-performance approach as concentrated risk. Robinhood's partnership with Arbitrum is a prime example—ETH's high gas costs have become an advantage for screening high-value transactions. The current battle is about who can win Wall Street's favor.
6. ETH has nine years of development, while SOL has only four. While native projects like Jupiter and Jito have demonstrated world-class product capabilities, they still lag behind giants like Uniswap, AAVE, and MakerDAO in market education and trust.
In short, the painful memories of the E-guards may give rise to a wave of S-guards in a new market Fomo, but in my opinion, this competition is essentially a temporary mismatch between institutional and retail narratives. After all, ETH wasn't built in a day, and SOL's growth rate is actually quite astonishing.
