Over the past two weeks, both Ethereum [ETH] and Solana [SOL] have declined in value. Recent data shows ETH trading at $2,039, down more than 12% in the past week, while SOL dropped over 17% during the same period, according to CoinMarketCap
Solana has been gaining ground in network activity, while Ethereum has experienced a less severe price crash. Transactions, capital flow, DEX volume, and payments data offer insights into how the Ethereum and Solana contest is going in 2026.
First, Solana’s daily transaction activity hit a new peak of 160 million this month, as per Blockworks data. The activity has been growing steadily since November 2021, a period when there was an altcoin season.
During this time, SOL was trading around $84. This did not reflect the strength in network activity. However, this weakness was market-wide.
Solana’s strength was not only in activity but also in capital inflows.
Over the last week, more than $100 million was bridged from other chains to SOL, with Ethereum contributing more than $50 million. This demonstrated Solana’s increasing dominance in transaction activity.
Other chains that significantly bridged to Solana were TRON [TRX], Base, Arbitrum [ARB], and BNB Chain, respectively.
Solana also surpassed Ethereum in decentralized exchange (DEX) volume. The data showed Solana at $117 billion, more than double Ethereum’s $52 billion, which ranked second.
The altcoin outperformed BNB Chain, Base, and Arbitrum, which ranked just behind it. This indicates that Solana is excelling not only in comparison to Ethereum but also across the broader crypto sector.
Such high trading volume emanated from projects running on the Solana blockchain. It harbors most of the memecoins, and now tokens in RWA and DePIN, among other sectors, are launching on SOL.
That explains why it has quickly caught up with ETH, which was a leader in most of the DeFi activities.
Even in the new payment rails, Solana continues to dominate Ethereum, as per Artemis data.
Most of the volume is dominated by fintech like PayPal, which had $1.8 trillion as of writing. On the other hand, Solana and Ethereum had $6.5 billion and $68.2 billion, respectively.
However, in terms of growth percentage, blockchain leads. For instance, SOL grew by 755%, while ETH had 625%. PayPal only managed 6.3%. Another contest lost by ETH to SOL.
Combining all this data showed that Solana was quickly growing to challenge Ethereum’s dominance in blockchain technology.
However, the battle was far from over. ETH dominated in Total Value Locked (TVL) with over $136 billion in assets. Solana only managed $17 billion. This suggested that ETH was still the bigger blockchain, as the TVL showed where confidence was.
