The year 2025 has emerged as a year of consolidation, with major layer-1 networks laying the groundwork for the tooling and technology that will lead to better interoperability, as well as pushing forward with real-world financial use cases.
For Ethereum, that meant a surge in institutional adoption and steady progress on scaling, while builders increasingly looked toward interoperability as the key challenge heading into 2026. For Solana, the focus was on stress-testing the network under real demand and hardening its infrastructure, setting the stage for deeper financial use cases in the year ahead. Together, the two networks offer a glimpse into how the industry’s leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption.
This shift matters because deeper institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more real-world financial use cases could influence long-term demand, yield opportunities, and the durability of returns tied to the assets built on top of these networks.
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been driven in large part by growing institutional adoption, including from spot ETFs driving up to the emergence of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, the cofounder of ether.fi, one of the largest restaking networks, pointed to ongoing improvements at the protocol level as a key enabler, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer one more scalable,” with transactions already “super cheap now and will continue to get better.”
He added that progress on layer-two interoperability — “making it easier to move assets across layer twos and Ethereum” — has been “exactly the right stuff to work on,” alongside broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.
That push toward interoperability is also resonating with builders across the Ethereum ecosystem. Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind Base’s largest decentralized exchange, Aerodrome, said the next wave of Ethereum upgrades marks 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.”
He said recent advancements in interoperability technology are setting the stage for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, 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.”
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