Ethereum rival Solana’s total value locked (TVL) soared in the final quarter of 2024, according to Messari’s “State of Solana Q4 2024” report. It increased by 64% compared to the third quarter and by 486% year-over-year, reaching an impressive $8.6 billion. Solana is now second only to Ethereum, having surpassed Tron in November 2024.
The TVL represents the total value of digital assets staked or locked within a blockchain’s smart contracts. Raydium led the charge on Solana. The blockchain’s biggest decentralized exchange (DEX) gained 86% in TVL quarter-over-quarter, closing the year with a market share of 24%. According to Messari, the DEX’s dominance is owed to memecoin and AI-related crypto trading.
In spite of a slowdown in retail trading and a cooling crypto market, Solana keeps generating more revenue than Ethereum, DefiLlama reports. The gap is even more pronounced in terms of apps. Solana app revenues exceed Ethereum apps tenfold as of February 2025.
This data is current even after considering the plethora of Layer-2 blockchains on Ethereum, which host a vast share of trading activity. Solana’s revenue exceeded $8.4 million on February 9, compared to $875,571 for Ethereum. Still, Ethereum has the lead in terms of TVL: just under $57 billion compared to Solana’s $9.5 billion. With Bitcoin migrating to Solana through platforms like Zeus Network, Solana is expected to surpass Ethereum in this category.
Solana’s speed and scalability appeal to institutions like Franklin Templeton, BlackRock, and Société Générale. The blockchain is built to handle up to 65,000 transactions per second (TPS), supporting highly data-intensive operations. It is uniquely suitable for institutional adoption thanks to its reliable security and low transaction costs, providing the infrastructure financial institutions need to tokenize assets, integrate DeFi into workflow, or process real-time payments. Solana is used by Securitize, one of BlackRock’s leading partners. The collaboration aims to streamline and simplify tokenization, alleviating investors’ access to diverse financial products.
According to Solscan, the number of active Solana wallets grew fourfold from May last year to February 2025, specifically from around 1 million to over 4 million, with spikes to 8 million on occasion. Transactions increased from 200 to 400 million, and real TPS achieved a record 4,000 last year.
Zeus Network, Solana’s and Bitcoin’s flagship permissionless communication layer, offers an innovative way to tap into Bitcoin community value. Specifically, its dApp APOLLO has introduced Bitcoin liquidity to Solana. The dApp’s final testnet launched successfully on August 8, engaging over 30,000 unique addresses. Following upgrades to the Zeus Program Library, it is possible to integrate Bitcoin assets on Solana. There are currently 11 cross-chain interactions worth $16,441 in progress. Zeus Network has confirmed a total of 581 interactions so far, valued at $23.75 million.
The simplicity of onboarding to Zeus is a major winning point. Users only connect their Solana and Bitcoin wallets and bind the two addresses to bring Bitcoin liquidity over. To connect a Bitcoin wallet to APOLLO, users must install one that the dApp supports, such as UniSat or Xverse. Then, they click “Connect” on the APOLLO platform, which also supports Phantom, Solflare, and other Solana wallets. The process of linking the Solana wallet is the same. Finally, they approve the signature request to bind the Solana to the Bitcoin wallet.
Solana’s use of the Proof of History (PoH) protocol has been its primary improvement over the Ethereum network. Via PoH consensus, Solana achieves the throughput of 65,000 TPS (despite some other blockchains’ higher time to finality) without side chains or second layers. The mechanism creates a record that proves an event occurred at a specific time. Solana’s validators do not agree on a time, but encode it with a cryptographic hash function instead, the SHA-256. This eliminates the need to wait for confirmation.
In 2025, Solana will expand to Firedancer, its fourth validator. This is a colossal network upgrade developed by Jump Trading. The new validator is expected to significantly improve upon the blockchain’s transaction processing capacity. Firedancer will allow it to process over a million transactions per second as well as enhance security. Solana processes one block every 2.34 seconds, compared to Ethereum’s 13 seconds and processing capability of 15-45 TPS.
Ethereum’s transaction fees are over $1. While L2 scaling solutions and the move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) have helped reduce them, they remain a barrier for developers and users. In contrast, Solana’s architecture enables transaction costs of around $0.02 (0.0001 SOL), making it more attractive, particularly for frequent transactions.
One final area in which Solana excels involves programming languages and smart contracts. Ethereum uses Solidity as the main language for writing smart contracts. It was built specifically for the Ethereum Virtual Machine and is influenced by JavaScript, Python, and C++, so any developer with experience in these languages can learn it with relative ease.
Sealevel, Solana’s smart contract platform, increases throughput via parallel processing capabilities. Most smart contracts are written in Rust, which was selected for its performance and memory safety features. It is a compelling choice for blockchain development in part due to its dedicated community. Rust is more versatile than Solidity, which appeals to creators of high-speed dApps.
Solana’s advantages and the possibility of bringing Bitcoin liquidity on-chain augment its efforts to overtake Ethereum in TVL and other adoption benchmarks.
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