2025 has proven to be a year of consolidation, with significant Layer 1 networks laying the foundation for the tools and technologies that will drive greater interoperability, while also advancing real-world financial use cases.
For Ethereum, this meant increasing institutional adoption and steady progress in scaling, while builders increasingly saw interoperability as the main challenge heading into 2026. For Solana, the focus was on stress testing the network under real demand and strengthening its infrastructure, paving the way for deeper financial use cases in the coming year. Together, the two networks offer insight into how the industry’s leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption.
This change is important because greater institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more real-world financial use cases could influence long-term demand, yield opportunities, and the sustainability of yields tied to assets built on top of these networks.
Ethereum’s push towards interoperability in 2026
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has largely been driven by growing institutional adoption, including from spot ETFs to the emergence of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, co-founder of Ether.fi, one of the largest restructuring networks, highlighted continued improvements at the protocol level as a key factor, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer more scalable,” with transactions already “very cheap now and will continue to improve.”
He added that progress in layer two interoperability – “making it easier to move assets between layer two and Ethereum” – was “exactly the right thing to work on”, alongside broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.
This push towards interoperability also resonates with builders in 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 a word: unification,” Cutler said. “We spent over 5 years making things cheaper and faster, but with fractured UX and fragmented liquidity. It’s about to end.”
He said recent advancements in interoperability technology are paving the way for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, predicting that “2026 will be the year where all of these siled ecosystems come together to create a lightning-fast, cost-effective, and truly interoperable experience for users and institutions.”
Although ETFs have expanded access to ether, Silagadze said they fail to expose investors to the economic activity taking place on-chain.
“ETFs give you access to the asset, but they don’t really give you exposure to DeFi or earning opportunities,” he said, arguing that DATs fill this gap. “I think that’s where DATs come in…and I think it’s definitely had a positive impact on the price (of ETH), without a doubt.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, the lowest this year, but rebounded to $4,832 in August as DATs followed the trend. ETH now stands at around $3,000, according to CoinMarketCap.
Looking ahead to 2026, Silagadze, who spends his time at ether.fi focusing on neobank solutions, said he hopes Ethereum’s next phase will be defined less by speculative cycles and more by continued scaling coupled with tangible, everyday utility. While infrastructure improvements such as cheaper transactions and better layer-two interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes true adoption will ultimately come from products that look familiar to mainstream users but are built entirely on crypto rails.
“I really believe the intent is, or the adoption will come from a lot of these crypto, neobank type players,” he said, highlighting financial services that combine self-custody, yield and composability into a single user experience.
For Silagadze, this shift requires the ecosystem to move beyond what he sees as an overemphasis on “gaming”-focused activities and toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale. He highlighted the importance of expanding access to concrete services, from tokenized stocks to globally accessible banking tools, saying these types of products will bring sustained growth of Ethereum users.
This 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 neobanking, but more non-gambling types of use cases,” he said.
According to him, neobanking-style platforms could serve as a bridge between Ethereum’s on-chain infrastructure and the next wave of users, translating technical progress into everyday financial utility.
Solana was head 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, largely driven by memecoin trading that pushed the network to its limits.
“January was a really crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, CEO of Jito Labs, pointing to increased transaction volumes and unusually high revenues from validators and DeFi protocols. This pressure helped to harden the network.
Compared to a year earlier, Solana is now “super smooth,” he said, with faster performance and significantly greater capacity. Block space grew by around 25% in 2025, improving user experience and reducing fees, while a new wave of DeFi teams arrived “highly energetic to build on Solana.” The result, Bruder argued, was a year in which Solana’s long-promised role as a high-speed financial network began to come to fruition.
“2025 was just crazy, like everyone 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 the doubling of infrastructure. The company focused on BAM, a new product designed to make transaction sequencing more transparent. The goal, Bruder said, was to “unlock new design spaces, new markets and new economies” by improving the way transactions are ordered and priced. Although highly technical, the result is simple: “better applications, better prices for users and a better user experience”. This work prepares the ground for what follows.
A key inflection point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the deployment 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 significantly reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12-13 seconds to fully complete; Under Alpenglow, Bruder said, completion could drop to around a second, meaning transactions would effectively become irreversible almost immediately.
This change has significant implications for high-stakes financial activity, where rapid and deterministic settlement is essential. By strengthening finality guarantees and facilitating network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited to large markets, with these enhancements widely considered 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 an infrastructure layer for what he has repeatedly described as a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
Read more: Solana set to undergo major overhaul after 98% vote to approve historic ‘Alpenglow’
