Ethereum rival Solana’s complete worth locked (TVL) soared within the last quarter of 2024, in accordance with Messari’s “State of Solana Q4 2024” report. It elevated by 64% in comparison with the third quarter and by 486% year-over-year, reaching a powerful $8.6 billion. Solana is now second solely to Ethereum, having surpassed Tron in November 2024.
The TVL represents the entire worth of digital property staked or locked inside a blockchain’s good contracts. Raydium led the cost on Solana. The blockchain’s greatest decentralized change (DEX) gained 86% in TVL quarter-over-quarter, closing the 12 months with a market share of 24%. Based on Messari, the DEX’s dominance is owed to memecoin and AI-related crypto buying and selling.
Regardless of a slowdown in retail buying and selling and a cooling crypto market, Solana retains producing extra income than Ethereum, DefiLlama reviews. The hole is much more pronounced by way of apps. Solana app revenues exceed Ethereum apps tenfold as of February 2025.
This information is present even after contemplating the plethora of Layer-2 blockchains on Ethereum, which host an enormous share of buying and selling exercise. Solana’s income exceeded $8.4 million on February 9, in comparison with $875,571 for Ethereum. Nonetheless, Ethereum has the lead by way of TVL: just below $57 billion in comparison with Solana’s $9.5 billion. With Bitcoin migrating to Solana by means of platforms like Zeus Community, Solana is anticipated to surpass Ethereum on this class.
Solana is profitable over institutional and retail customers
Solana’s velocity and scalability enchantment to establishments like Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and Société Générale. The blockchain is constructed to deal with as much as 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), supporting extremely data-intensive operations. It’s uniquely appropriate for institutional adoption due to its dependable safety and low transaction prices, offering the infrastructure monetary establishments must tokenize property, combine DeFi into workflow, or course of real-time funds. Solana is utilized by Securitize, one in all BlackRock’s main companions. The collaboration goals to streamline and simplify tokenization, assuaging traders’ entry to various monetary merchandise.
Based on Solscan, the variety of energetic Solana wallets grew fourfold from Could final 12 months to February 2025, particularly from round 1 million to over 4 million, with spikes to eight million on event. Transactions elevated from 200 to 400 million, and actual TPS achieved a report 4,000 final 12 months.
The shift of Bitcoin liquidity marks a turning level in Solana’s development
Zeus Network, Solana’s and Bitcoin’s flagship permissionless communication layer, presents an revolutionary approach to faucet into Bitcoin neighborhood worth. Particularly, its dApp APOLLO has launched Bitcoin liquidity to Solana. The dApp’s last testnet launched efficiently on August 8, participating over 30,000 distinctive addresses. Following upgrades to the Zeus Program Library, it’s doable to combine Bitcoin property on Solana. There are at the moment 11 cross-chain interactions price $16,441 in progress. Zeus Community has confirmed a complete of 581 interactions to this point, valued at $23.75 million.
The simplicity of onboarding to Zeus is a significant profitable level. Customers solely join their Solana and Bitcoin wallets and bind the 2 addresses to convey Bitcoin liquidity over. To attach a Bitcoin pockets to APOLLO, customers should set up one which the dApp helps, comparable to UniSat or Xverse. Then, they click on “Join” on the APOLLO platform, which additionally helps Phantom, Solflare, and different Solana wallets. The method of linking the Solana pockets is identical. Lastly, they approve the signature request to bind the Solana to the Bitcoin pockets.
Benefits of Solana’s PoH over Ethereum’s PoS
Solana’s use of the Proof of Historical past (PoH) protocol has been its major enchancment over the Ethereum community. Through PoH consensus, Solana achieves the throughput of 65,000 TPS (regardless of another blockchains’ larger time to finality) with out aspect chains or second layers. The mechanism creates a report that proves an occasion occurred at a selected time. Solana’s validators don’t agree on a time, however encode it with a cryptographic hash operate as an alternative, the SHA-256. This eliminates the necessity to anticipate affirmation.
Firedancer: an vital milestone
In 2025, Solana will increase to Firedancer, its fourth validator. This can be a colossal community improve developed by Bounce Buying and selling. The brand new validator is anticipated to considerably enhance upon the blockchain’s transaction processing capability. Firedancer will permit it to course of over one million transactions per second in addition to improve safety. Solana processes one block each 2.34 seconds, in comparison with Ethereum’s 13 seconds and processing functionality of 15-45 TPS.
Decrease charges and well-optimized good contracts
Ethereum’s transaction charges are over $1. Whereas L2 scaling options and the transfer to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) have helped scale back them, they continue to be a barrier for builders and customers. In distinction, Solana’s structure allows transaction prices of round $0.02 (0.0001 SOL), making it extra enticing, notably for frequent transactions.
One last space wherein Solana excels includes programming languages and good contracts. Ethereum makes use of Solidity as the principle language for writing good contracts. It was constructed particularly for the Ethereum Digital Machine and is influenced by JavaScript, Python, and C++, so any developer with expertise in these languages can study it with relative ease.
Sealevel, Solana’s good contract platform, will increase throughput through parallel processing capabilities. Most good contracts are written in Rust, which was chosen for its efficiency and reminiscence security options. It’s a compelling alternative for blockchain improvement partially as a result of its devoted neighborhood. Rust is extra versatile than Solidity, which appeals to creators of high-speed dApps.
Solana’s benefits and the potential for bringing Bitcoin liquidity on-chain increase its efforts to overhaul Ethereum in TVL and different adoption benchmarks.
