The year 2025 has emerged as a year of consolidation, with large layer-1 networks laying the foundation for the tools and technology that will lead to better interoperability, as well as pushing forward with real economic use cases.
For Ethereum, that meant an increase in institutional adoption and steady progress with 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 economic use cases in the coming year. Together, the two networks provide an insight into how the industry’s leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption.
This shift is important because deeper institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more real-world economic use cases can impact long-term demand, return opportunities, and the sustainability of returns attached to the assets built on top of these networks.
Ethereum’s 2026 push toward interoperability
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been largely driven by growing institutional adoption, including from spot ETFs fueled by the rise of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, co-founder 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 Ethereum’s mainnet layer another scalable one,” with transactions already “super cheap now and will continue to get better.”
He added that advances in layer two interoperability — “making it easier to move assets across layer two and Ethereum” — have been “exactly the right things to work on,” along with broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.
This 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 one word: association,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent 5+ years making things cheaper and faster, but making broken UX and fragmented liquidity. It’s coming to an end.”
He said recent advances in interoperability technology are setting the stage for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, predicting that “2026 will be the year when all these siled ecosystems come back together to create a lightning-fast, cost-effective and truly interoperable experience for both users and institutions.”
While ETFs have expanded access to ether, Silagadze said they fall short of exposing investors to the economic activity that happens on the chain.
“The ETFs give you access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or the monetization opportunities,” he said, arguing that DATs fill that gap. “I think that’s where the DATs come in… and I think it definitely had a positive impact on the price [of ETH]no questions.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, its lowest this year, but rebounded to $4,832 in August as DATs were on the rise. Now, ETH is sitting at around $3,000, according to CoinMarketCap.
Silagadze, who spends his time at ether.fi focusing on neobank solutions, said he hopes Ethereum’s next phase is defined less by speculative cycles and more by continued scaling paired with tangible, everyday utility. While infrastructure improvements like cheaper transactions and better layer two interoperability form the foundation, he believes that real adoption will ultimately come from products that feel familiar to mainstream users but are built entirely on crypto rails.
“I really believe that the intent or the adoption will come from a lot of these neobank-type crypto players,” he said, pointing to financial services that combine leverage, leverage and compounding into a single user experience.
For Silagadze, that shift requires the ecosystem to move beyond what he sees as a predominance of “gambling”-driven activity and toward applications that solve real economic problems at scale. He emphasized the importance of expanding access to concrete services, from tokenized shares to globally accessible banking tools, arguing that these kinds of products are what will bring sustained user growth to Ethereum.
That means “more real-world use cases, whether it’s providing access to tokenized stocks to a wider, global audience, access to more banking services like crypto neobank, but more non-gambling use cases,” 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 who translate technical advances into everyday financial utility.
Solana was heads down for 2025 to prepare for 2026
For Solana, after a volatile but formative 2024, the network seemed to find its footing in 2025. Activity peaked early in the year, driven largely by trading of memecoins that pushed the network to its limits.
“January was a really crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs, pointing to increasing transaction volumes and unusually high earnings for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped harden the network.
Compared to a year earlier, the Solana is now “super buttery,” he said, with faster performance and meaningfully more capacity. Block space increased by around 25% by 2025, improving user experience and lowering fees, while a new 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 everybody was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” really started to materialize.
For Jito, 2025 was defined by doubling the infrastructure. The firm focused on BAM, a new product designed to make the transaction sequence 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. Although highly technical, the payoff is straightforward: “better applications, better prices for users and a better user experience.” That work sets the stage for what comes next.
A major turning point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the rollout of Alpenglow, a long-awaited upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, one that should significantly improve reliability while greatly reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to complete completely; under Alpenglow, Bruder said, completion could drop to about a second, meaning transactions become irreversible almost instantly.
This shift has significant implications for high-stakes financial activity, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. By tightening finality guarantees and smoothing network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited to large markets, with these improvements widely considered prerequisites for high-stakes financial activity. In Bruder’s view, the upgrade is less about incremental performance gains and more about strengthening Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for what he repeatedly described as a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
Read more: Solana set for major overhaul after 98% vote to approve historic ‘Alpenglow’
