The year 2025 has emerged as a year of consolidation, with major Layer-1 networks laying the groundwork for tooling and technology that will drive better interoperability, while also driving real-world financial use cases.
For Ethereum, this means increased institutional adoption and steady progress on scaling, while builders are looking towards interoperability as the key challenge in 2026. For Solana, the focus was on stress-testing the network under real demand and strengthening its infrastructure, setting the stage for deeper financial use cases in the coming year. Together, the two networks offer a glimpse into how industry-leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption.
This shift matters because deeper institutional adoption, improved interoperability, and more real-world financial use cases could impact the sustainability of long-term demand, yield opportunities, and returns associated with assets built on top of these networks.
Ethereum moves towards 2026 interoperability
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been driven largely by large-scale institutional adoption, from spot ETFs to the emergence of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, co-founder of ether.fi, one of the largest retaching networks, pointed to ongoing improvements at the protocol level as a key enabler, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer an even more scalable one,” with transactions already “super cheap and will keep getting better.”
He said progress on layer-two interoperability – “making it easier to transfer assets to layer two and into Ethereum” – along with broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption have been “absolutely the right thing to work on.”
This push toward interoperability is also resonating with builders of the Ethereum ecosystem. Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind Aerodrome, the largest decentralized exchange based on Base, said the next wave of Ethereum upgrades marks a turning point after years of fragmentation.
“In one word: integration,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent 5+ years making things cheaper and faster, but creating fragmented UX and fragmented liquidity. It’s about to 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 of these ecosystems come back together to create lightning-fast, cost-effective, and truly interoperable experiences for users and institutions.”
While ETFs have expanded access to ether, Silagadze said they have failed to keep investors informed about the economic activity taking place on the chain.
“ETFs give you access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or earning opportunities,” he said, arguing that DATs fill that gap. “I think that’s where DATs come in… and I think it’s definitely had a positive impact on the price [of ETH]no question.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, its lowest level this year, but recovered to $4,832 by August as DAT trended up. According to CoinMarketCap, ETH now sits at around $3,000.
Looking toward 2026, Tsilagadze, who spends his time at Ether.fi focusing on neobank solutions, said he expects Ethereum’s next phase to be defined less by speculative cycles and more by sustained scaling with tangible, everyday utility. While infrastructure improvements like cheaper transactions and better layer-two interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes real adopters will ultimately come from products that feel familiar to mainstream users but are built entirely on crypto rails.
“I really believe there is intent, or adoption is going to come from a lot of these crypto, neobank type players,” he said, pointing to financial services that combine self-custody, yield and composability into a single user experience.
For Silagadze, that shift requires the ecosystem to de-emphasize “gambling”-driven activity and move toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale. He stressed the importance of increasing access to tangible services, from tokenized equities to globally accessible banking tools, and argued that these types of products will bring continued user growth to Ethereum.
That means “more real-world use cases, whether it’s providing access to tokenized stocks to a broader, global audience, providing access to more banking services like crypto neobanks, but also more types of non-gambling use cases,” he said.
In his view, neobanking-style platforms could serve as a bridge between Ethereum’s on-chain infrastructure and the next wave of users, turning technological advancements into everyday financial utility.
Solana was ready for 2025, ready for 2026
As for Solana, after a shaky but constructive 2024, the network appears to be finding its feet in 2025. Activity peaked at the beginning of the year, driven largely by Memecoin trading that pushed the network to its limits.
“January was really a crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, CEO of Zito Labs, pointing to increased transaction volumes and unusually high revenues for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped strengthen the network.
Compared with a year ago, Solana is now “super buttery smooth,” he said, with faster performance and meaningfully more capacity. Block space grew by nearly 25% in 2025, improving user experience and reducing fees, while a new wave of DeFi teams “are very energetic to build on Solana.” The result, Bruder argued, was the year in which Solana’s long-promised role as a high-throughput financial network began.
“2025 was just crazy, like everyone was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time that the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” really started to come true.
For Jeeto, 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 transaction ordering and pricing. Despite being highly technical, the payoff is straightforward: “Better applications, better pricing for users, and better user experience.” That work sets the stage for what comes next.
A significant inflection point for the network is expected to come in 2026 with the rollout of Alpenglo, a long-awaited upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglo as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, which should improve reliability while exponentially reducing confirmation times. Today, it typically takes 12 to 13 seconds for a Solana transaction to be fully finalized; Under Alpenglow, finalization can take about a second, Bruder said, meaning transactions become effectively irreversible almost immediately.
That change has a significant impact on high-risk financial activities, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. By tightening finality guarantees and streamlining network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited for larger markets, improvements that are widely seen as necessary conditions 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 has repeatedly described as “a truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
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