The 12 months 2025 has emerged as a 12 months of consolidation, with main layer-1 networks laying the groundwork for the tooling and know-how that can result in higher interoperability, in addition to pushing ahead with real-world monetary use circumstances.
For Ethereum, that meant a surge in institutional adoption and regular progress on scaling, whereas builders more and more seemed towards interoperability as the important thing problem heading into 2026. For Solana, the main target was on stress-testing the community below actual demand and hardening its infrastructure, setting the stage for deeper monetary use circumstances within the 12 months forward. Collectively, the 2 networks provide a glimpse into how the business’s main platforms are positioning themselves for the subsequent wave of adoption.
This shift issues as a result of deeper institutional adoption, higher interoperability, and extra real-world monetary use circumstances might affect long-term demand, yield alternatives, and the sturdiness of returns tied to the property constructed on prime of those networks.
Ethereum’s 2026 push in the direction of interoperability
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been pushed largely by rising institutional adoption, together with from spot ETFs driving as much as the emergence of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, the cofounder of ether.fi, one of many largest restaking networks, pointed to ongoing enhancements on the protocol degree as a key enabler, noting that the community is targeted 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 towards interoperability can also be resonating with builders throughout the Ethereum ecosystem. Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the crew behind Base’s largest decentralized alternate, Aerodrome, stated the subsequent wave of Ethereum upgrades marks a turning level after years of fragmentation.
“In a word: unification,” Cutler stated. “We’ve spent 5+ years making things cheaper and faster, but in doing fractured UX and fragmented liquidity. That’s about to end.”
He stated latest developments in interoperability know-how are setting the stage for a serious 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.”
Whereas ETFs have expanded entry to ether, Silagadze stated they fall in need of exposing buyers to the financial exercise occurring onchain.
“The ETFs let you have access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or the earning opportunities,” he stated, arguing that DATs fill that hole. “I think that’s where the DATs come in… and I think it certainly had a positive impact on the price [of ETH], no question.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, the bottom this 12 months, however bounced again $4,832 by August as DATs have been trending. Now ETH sits at roughly $3,000, in line with CoinMarketCap.
Waiting for 2026, Silagadze, who spends his time at ether.fi specializing in neobank options, stated he hopes Ethereum’s subsequent section is outlined much less by speculative cycles and extra by continued scaling paired with tangible, on a regular basis utility. Whereas infrastructure enhancements like cheaper transactions and higher layer-two interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes actual adoption will in the end come from merchandise that really feel acquainted to mainstream customers however are constructed completely on crypto rails.
“I really believe that the intent is, or that the adoption is going to come from a lot of these crypto, neobank type players,” he stated, pointing to monetary companies that mix self-custody, yield, and composability in a single consumer expertise.
For Silagadze, that shift requires the ecosystem to maneuver past what he sees as an overemphasis on “gambling”-driven exercise and towards purposes that resolve actual monetary issues at scale. He emphasised the significance of increasing entry to concrete companies, from tokenized equities to globally accessible banking instruments, arguing that these sorts of merchandise are what is going to carry sustained consumer progress to Ethereum.
Which means “extra actual world use circumstances, whether or not it is giving entry to tokenized shares to a broader, world viewers, entry to extra banking companies like crypto neobank, however extra sorts of non-gambling use circumstances,” he said.
In his view, neobanking-style platforms could serve as the bridge between Ethereum’s on-chain infrastructure and the next wave of users, translating technical progress into everyday financial utility.
Solana was heads down for 2025 to prepare for 2026
For Solana, after a volatile but formative 2024, the network appeared to find its footing in 2025. Activity peaked early in the year, driven largely by memecoin trading that pushed the network to its limits.
“January was a really crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, the CEO of Jito Labs, pointing to surging transaction volumes and unusually high revenue for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped harden the network.
Compared to a year earlier, Solana is now “super buttery smooth,” he said, with faster performance and meaningfully more capacity. Block space increased roughly 25% in 2025, improving user experience and lowering fees, while a fresh wave of DeFi teams arrived “very energized to build on Solana.” The result, Bruder argued, was a year in which Solana’s long-promised role as a high-throughput financial network began to take place.
“2025 was just crazy, like everyone was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” truly started to materialize.
For Jito, 2025 was defined by doubling down on infrastructure. The firm focused on BAM, a new product designed to make transaction sequencing more transparent. The goal, Bruder said, was to “unlock new design spaces and new markets and new economies” by improving how transactions are ordered and priced. While highly technical, the payoff is straightforward: “better applications, better pricing for users, and a better user experience.” That work sets the stage for what comes next.
A key inflection point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the rollout of Alpenglow, a long-anticipated upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, one that should materially improve reliability while sharply reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to fully finalize; under Alpenglow, Bruder said, finalization could drop to around one second, meaning transactions become effectively irreversible almost immediately.
That shift has significant implications for high-stakes financial activity, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. By tightening finality guarantees and smoothing out network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited for large markets, with those improvements widely viewed as prerequisites for high-stakes financial activity. In Bruder’s view, the upgrade is less about incremental performance gains and more about solidifying Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for what he repeatedly described as a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
Read more: Solana Set for Main Overhaul After 98% Votes to Approve Historic ‘Alpenglow’
