Bitcoin holds around $90,000, but alt? It’s a mixed bag in early 2026. Solana’s ecosystem is teeming with memecoin frenzy and DeFi revivals, while Sui is quietly stacking up real tech wins.
Which one best prepares you for the rest of the year? Sui or Solana? Let’s check it out!
Solana: the high-speed casino that crushes the volume
Solana has always been the speed demon of blockchains. It processes thousands of transactions per second thanks to this proof-of-history magic.
This is a timestamping system that allows validators to agree on an order without endless chatter. We’ve seen it handle 65,000 TPS in testing, much faster than Ethereum’s base layer. Think about it like this. It’s like a Ferrari on a racetrack, overtaking its competitors when the network is humming.
This is powered by an intelligent routing system on Solana’s lightning-fast blockchain, a true game changer that could redefine the standard for on-chain payments forever! 🚀
Solana dominates almost every test with its insane ~65,000 theoretical TPS, sub-second finality (~400ms…
-ChaîneX (@FreedomXTech) December 13, 2025
That said, outages have already hit us. Remember those 2022 downtimes? Solana has improved with Firedancer upgrades, but congestion from memecoins still drives up fees.
From an ecosystem perspective, it’s exploding. Jito’s recovery reached $2 billion TVL in January 2026. Pump.fun launched 1.2 million tokens last month alone and 37,000 yesterday.
Jito – @jito_sol TVL grows from approximately $648 million in early 2024 to over $2.3 billion today + $50 million investment in JitoSol by a16z
-Gally Sama (@hdcharting) November 14, 2025
What about DeFi on Solana? Aggregator Jupiter DEX traded $150 billion in volume in Q1 2026. Pretty cool.
NFT and games? Magic Eden dominates with 40% market share and Helium has migrated for IoT scalability. Developers love it, as you see with 3 million daily active wallets in 2025. Something we love: mobile push with Solana’s Seeker Phone. They are seriously considering going into mobile.
Price action
SOL is trading at $122 with a market cap of $69 billion, per Coingecko. That’s down 47% over the past 12 months. The RSI, like most oscillator indicators on TradingView, is neutral. And that’s OK for now. This also means the sentiment isn’t that great and it could be a good deal for a long term purchase at this price.
Sui: getting the most out of movement
Sui returns the script with its object-centric model using the Move language.
It’s like combining the security of the Rust language with parallel execution. No more global state bottlenecks like Ethereum or even Solana.
It fragments data so that transactions are processed independently, reaching 297,000 TPS in lab testing by the end of 2025. Why is this important? It’s like going from a single lane highway to infinite parallel lanes. No traffic jams during rush hours. And remember, sharding is Ethereum’s ultimate goal for scalability. Sui already does it.
Sui’s Mysticeti consensus reached up to 297,000 TPS in testing, surpassing Aptos’ mainnet peak of 13,000, although real-time averages were similar at ~25 tx/s for both; Sui leads TVL with $2.6 billion compared to Aptos’ $0.5 billion in 2026.
A purple monkey horse hybrid logically combines primate agility with…
– Grok (@grok) January 18, 2026
The ecosystem is maturing quickly. TVL jumped to $850 million, led by Navi Protocol loans at $284 million. DeepBook, their native aggregator, does much of this volume in the background.
In The Sui Stack, Walrus storage enables blob throughput. This represents large blocks of unstructured data. This led to a 400% increase in AI data. This now represents 17 TB of data.
🚨 HUGE: 17.8 TB uploaded to Walrus yesterday 🦭
Our biggest single-day download ever. More than double the previous record.
The infrastructure manages enterprise-wide data exactly as intended. pic.twitter.com/MNucIeu0xN
– Morse 🦭/acc (@WalrusProtocol) January 27, 2026
Establishments? Franklin Templeton has tokenized funds on Sui, already $250 million in assets under management. And zkLogin allows users to log in with Google. This easier integration has exploded to over 2 million wallets. Our crack research team has been tracking this. Sui doesn’t chase memes; it’s ready for business.
Price action
SUI at 91c with a market cap of $3.5 billion. Sui is also down over the past 12 months. Still, that’s only 8% of Solana’s cap. So it’s smaller and you’re ahead… The $11 billion FDV looks rich, but the fundamentals are clearly undervalued. The big risk here is that a decrease in liquidity leads to volatility. But choose wisely and you can 5x.
Face to face: technology stacks, adoption and enablers 2026
Now let’s look at technology stacks. Solana gains raw speed for now, but Sui’s parallel execution scales better in the long run. Solana’s Rust ecosystem has 10 times more dApps (5,000 versus 450 for Sui). But the loyalty of Sui developers? 30% higher growth rate. We say it’s a pickers’ market. And it is. Here you choose between volume and durability.
I repeat it.
The next 12 to 24 months will only be about one thing: @SuiNetwork the #1 Web3 development platform! pic.twitter.com/eS6gRzaIeO
– Adeniyi.sui (@EmanAbio) September 10, 2025
Adoption tells the story.
- Active Users: Solana is crushing daily active users at 3M, fueled by retail frenzy. Sui? Steady rise to 800K, with 60% institutional volume.
- Fees, Solana averages $0.00025, Sui $0.0001. It’s neck and neck.
- Tokenomics: SOL’s 6% inflation vs. Sui’s 4%, both delegated staking yields are around 7%.
Catalysts for 2026? Solana is betting on the Firedancer (T2) mainnet and the deployment of Visa stablecoin. Sui achieved Mysticeti live consensus (50x faster finality) and SuiPlay launch (T3). There is also a macro tailwind. Fed cuts are coming, and that means liquidity. Liquidity means capital flows into alts. But Solana’s addiction to memecoins? Risky if BTC dominance increases. And we don’t like how much the memecoin coin issuing system has used Solana apps.
From risk to reward? Solana is a $115 billion beast. At this size, it’s harder to multiply by 10 without a perfect storm. Sui at 10 billion dollars? Parabolic even…..We saw Solana pump 50x from 2021 lows. Sui could reflect that.
Conclusion
It’s a pretty simple thesis. Solana is now the battle-tested giant. But Sui is the undervalued contender positioned for dominance in 2026.
We are bullish on Sui for better risk-reward: tech advantage, institutional flows, and sub-$15B entry make it the smarter bet. Solana? A solid outfit if you’re into it, but diminishing returns loom.
DYOR as always. And follow the 2% rule for practical money management (maximum risk on an individual trade), as greater volatility could be on the way. Check out Sui on sui.io or on X today.
Which one do you prefer for your portfolio? Solana’s hype machine or Sui’s silent builder? Let us know in the comments below.
Disclaimer
The information provided by Altcoin Buzz does not constitute financial advice. It is intended for educational, entertainment and informational purposes only. Any opinions or strategies shared are those of the editors/reviewers, and their risk tolerance may differ from yours. We are not responsible for any losses you may incur as a result of investments related to the information provided. Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies are high-risk assets; therefore, perform thorough due diligence. Copyright Altcoin Buzz Pte Ltd.
