Ever since it launched in 2015, Ethereum (ETH -9.83%) has been the market leader in just about every niche of the blockchain industry. It now has a massive market cap of $265 billion, and has been one of the single best crypto investments you could have made over the past decade.
But here's the thing: Upstart blockchain challenger Solana (SOL -6.94%) has been outperforming Ethereum over the past two years. It is now growing faster than Ethereum, and from a purely technical perspective, it is faster, cheaper, and easier to use. So is it really possible that you should be buying Solana, and not Ethereum, right now?
Two cryptos, two different paths
Admittedly, the obvious, no-brainer pick for first-time crypto investors is Ethereum. After all, in terms of market cap, Ethereum is nearly four times larger than Solana. And it has an absolutely incredible track record over the past decade. The price of Ethereum has exploded from $2 in early 2016 to over $2,000 in early 2025, for a 1,000x return on investment. If you had invested just $1,000 in Ethereum a decade ago, chances are you might be a crypto millionaire by now.
However, if you zoom in on just the past two years, a different picture emerges. Here is a chart of the performance of Ethereum and Solana over the past two years. Over that time period, Solana is up 1,322% while Ethereum is only up a modest 81%.
Ethereum / US Dollar chart by TradingView
Quite simply, as soon as the crypto winter of 2022 ended, the paths of these two blockchain rivals started to diverge. After nearly a decade of dominance, Ethereum could be losing its mojo. It's now down 35% in 2025, with no clear signs of a reversal in sight.
Meanwhile, Solana appears to be going in the opposite direction. New user growth is off the charts, transaction activity is up, and blockchain stability is better than it has ever been. No wonder it has started to attract the attention of high-profile institutional investors such as Cathie Wood of Ark Invest, who has suggested that Solana might one day topple Ethereum.
Image source: Getty Images.
And as proof that Solana is now ready to challenge Ethereum, consider that President Donald Trump recently suggested that Solana -- just like Ethereum -- deserved a place in the nation's Strategic Crypto Reserve. That's how important Solana has become for the future of the crypto industry.
Future growth prospects
In all fairness, Solana's rapid growth over the past two years has been somewhat illusory. That's because Solana has become the blockchain of choice for creating, launching, and trading meme coins. Yes, new user growth may be way up, but that's primarily due to meme coin mania. And the same can be said for the growth in transaction activity. That activity is really just people swapping meme coins, all in the hopes of getting rich quick.
Thus, when the meme coin bubble finally burst in February, it took Solana with it. People started to challenge the logic of investing in meme coins and turning blockchains into virtual casinos, where fortunes could be made literally overnight.
CRYPTO: SOL
Key Data Points
And that's why Solana is now down a whopping 50% from an all-time high of $294 on Jan. 19. Investors are quickly moving out of risky assets, and Solana certainly looks risky right now. Year to date, Solana is now down 25%.
The good news is that Solana has plenty more tricks up its sleeve. The superior speed and throughput capacity of the Solana blockchain has made it a natural fit for areas such as decentralized finance (DeFi), where it now trails only Ethereum. And it has started to make waves in the area of artificial intelligence, where a top platform for creating AI agents recently expanded to Solana.
Is it really time to abandon Ethereum?
Keep in mind that past performance is no guarantee of future performance. While the track record of Ethereum over the past decade has been extraordinary, there is absolutely no guarantee that it will be able to repeat this performance over the next decade. In the tech industry, upstart challengers upend entrenched market leaders all the time, and I think that's what is happening now with Ethereum.
When it comes to Solana, I'm convinced that it has better long-term growth prospects than Ethereum. From my perspective, a changing of the guard may be occurring in the crypto industry. I'm buying Solana, and I'm not looking back.
