Solana now beats Ethereum on trading volume, active users, and fee revenue. Ethereum still holds the money. Halfway through 2026, the question is no longer who is faster. It is whether the two chains are even running the same race.

There was a time when the Ethereum versus Solana debate could be settled with a smirk and an outage screenshot. Solana was the chain that went down. Ethereum was the chain that mattered. Then Solana stopped going down, its trading volume flipped Ethereum’s, its ETF launched to institutional inflows while Ethereum funds bled for seventeen straight days, and the smirk changed sides.

Halfway through 2026, both tokens are deep in a bear market. ETH trades near $1,714 after a brutal second quarter that included a 29.5% thirty-day drawdown at the June lows, its worst quarterly stretch in years. SOL trades near $81, down roughly 78% from its cycle high, hit even harder in raw percentage terms. Price settles nothing here. The interesting story is underneath, in the on-chain data, where the two networks have diverged so completely that comparing them now requires deciding which metrics count.

So: is Ethereum losing the L1 race to Solana? The honest answer is that Solana has already won several of the events, Ethereum still owns the ones with the most prize money, and the race itself has split into two different sports.

How we got here: a short history of a long feud

The rivalry has run through three distinct acts, and the current one makes no sense without the first two.

Act one, 2021 through 2022, was Solana as the venture-backed challenger: a chain built for speed, championed by Sam Bankman-Fried, and dismissed by Ethereum partisans as a centralized science project. The dismissal briefly looked like prophecy. Solana suffered repeated full-network outages, including the infamous February 2024 halt that lasted nearly five hours after a legacy loader bug forced a coordinated validator restart, and when FTX collapsed in November 2022, SOL crashed toward single digits as the market priced in guilt by association. Obituaries were published. Several were smug.

Act two, 2023 through 2024, was the resurrection nobody ordered. Solana’s developer community kept shipping through the winter, the Jupiter and Jito ecosystems matured, memecoin mania found its natural home on the only chain where a thousand trades cost less than a sandwich, and DEX volume began the climb that ended with the flip of Ethereum in late 2024. Ethereum spent the same period executing its own plan flawlessly and discovering the plan had a hole in it: the Dencun upgrade in March 2024 introduced blob space and cut L2 costs by an order of magnitude, which supercharged rollup adoption while gutting the fee burn that had underwritten the ultrasound money narrative. Activity exploded across the Ethereum stack, and ETH the asset captured almost none of it.

Act three is now: both chains institutionally legitimate, both tokens deep underwater, and the argument relocated from architecture threads to fund flow tables. Uniswap founder Hayden Adams warned back in 2025 that Ethereum’s confused scaling identity could hand DeFi leadership to Solana; in 2026 that warning reads less like a hot take and more like a memo the market already acted on.

The scoreboard, metric by metric

Start with what Solana has flatly won: activity.

On a representative day in late June, Solana processed 127 million transactions from more than 2 million active addresses. Ethereum mainnet processed 2.8 million transactions from roughly 512,000 active addresses. That is not a gap. That is a different order of magnitude. Solana sustains 600 to 700 real transactions per second on average against Ethereum L1’s 15 to 20, at a cost of roughly $0.00025 per transaction against Ethereum’s dollars-per-swap mainnet pricing.

Trading volume tells the same story. Solana’s weekly DEX volume hit $11.49 billion in April against Ethereum’s $7.62 billion, a 51% lead. In February the monthly gap was wider still: $117 billion on Solana against $52 billion on Ethereum, more than double. Jupiter, the aggregator that routes the overwhelming majority of Solana order flow across Raydium, Orca, Phoenix, and Meteora, alone processes $2 billion to $4 billion in daily volume. Solana flipped Ethereum on DEX volume in late 2024 and has held the lead through every market condition since.

Then comes the metric that should worry Ethereum researchers most: revenue.

Solana generates over $1 million in chain fees per day. The major Ethereum L2s, where most Ethereum user activity now lives, generate under $200,000 combined, because blob-based data posting after the Dencun upgrade pushed L2 costs, and therefore L2 fee revenue, toward zero. Ethereum deliberately commoditized its own execution layer to win the rollup war. The result is a settlement layer with shrinking direct income and a rival that monetizes every swap on a single unified ledger.

Now flip the card, because Ethereum’s wins are just as lopsided.

Total value locked

Ethereum L1 holds roughly $55.6 billion in DeFi deposits, around 68% of the entire global DeFi market, and the combined L1 plus L2 figure exceeds $80 billion. Solana holds between $8 billion and $12 billion depending on the week and the methodology, a figure that took a $270 million hit in April when the Drift Protocol exploit tore through its perps ecosystem. The deepest protocols in the industry, Lido at $27.5 billion, Aave at $27 billion, EigenLayer at $13 billion, all live on Ethereum, and Aave V4 launched on Ethereum mainnet in April to reinforce the point.

Stablecoins

Ethereum hosts roughly 70% of all on-chain stablecoin supply, around $32 billion in USDC and $60 billion in USDT, and remains the venue where BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, and JPMorgan build tokenized products first. Solana carries about $14 billion in stablecoins, though each of those dollars turns over roughly six times faster than its Ethereum counterpart.

Developers

Ethereum counted 31,869 active developers against Solana’s 17,708 at the latest Electric Capital reading, and added more new developers over the trailing year than any other ecosystem. Solana ranked second.

One chain has the users, the volume, and the revenue. The other has the money, the institutions, and the builders. Losing, it turns out, depends entirely on where you point the camera.

How the race split in two

The reason the comparison keeps producing contradictory answers is that the two chains stopped competing on the same terms years ago, a divergence we chronicled when the ecosystems first collided in early 2025.

Ethereum abandoned the monolithic race on purpose. Its roadmap treats the base layer as settlement infrastructure while execution migrates to rollups: Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, and a long tail of zk systems that post proofs and data back to mainnet. Base alone captures nearly half of all L2 DeFi value, Arbitrum another 31%, and the top three rollups process close to 90% of all L2 transactions. Measured as a stack, the Ethereum ecosystem still dwarfs Solana on almost every capital metric. Measured as an L1, Ethereum mainnet is a slow, expensive chain that its own designers no longer intend retail users to touch.

Solana made the opposite bet: one ledger, one global state, sub-second finality at 400 milliseconds, and a relentless engineering campaign to make the single chain fast enough that nothing else is needed. The Firedancer validator client built by Jump Crypto, rolling toward full deployment late this year, is the endgame of that bet, with a theoretical ceiling measured in the hundreds of thousands of transactions per second. The network reliability problem that defined Solana’s reputation in 2022 and 2023 has largely disappeared; outages went from routine to rare, and the chain has traded its crash-prone image for something closer to an execution monopoly on retail flow.

The philosophical split produces the statistical one. Capital sits and compounds on Ethereum because that is what the architecture rewards: deep pools, long-duration lending, staking layered on restaking. Capital churns on Solana because sub-cent fees make churning free: high-frequency trading, memecoin rotation, dollar-cost-average bots, payments. Ethereum became the deposit ledger. Solana became the trading floor.

Follow the fees: two broken business models, one working one

The revenue gap deserves its own examination, because it is the metric where architecture decisions turn into economics, and where both chains have problems they rarely advertise.

Ethereum’s fee engine used to be the envy of the industry. EIP-1559 burned base fees, high demand made ETH deflationary, and the ultrasound money framing wrote itself. The rollup migration dismantled the machine step by step. Execution moved to L2s, whose sequencers keep the margin between what users pay and what blob posting costs, and Dencun made blob posting cost next to nothing. The result in 2026: mainnet burns a fraction of its former fee load, L2s pay Ethereum pennies for security worth billions, and the value accrual question, what does ETH earn when Base wins, has replaced scaling as the ecosystem’s defining unsolved problem. Ethereum built a settlement business and priced its product like a public good.

Solana’s engine is simpler and currently stronger: one chain captures every fee at every layer. The base fee is fixed at 5,000 lamports per signature, roughly a hundredth of a cent, while priority fees let users bid during congestion, and stake-weighted quality of service plus local fee markets keep hot accounts from clogging the scheduler. On top of the protocol fees sits the Jito MEV economy, where searcher tips flow to validators and stakers, turning order-flow chaos into staking yield. Over $1 million in daily chain revenue against sub-$200,000 for the entire major L2 basket is the visible output.

The caveat is concentration of source. A large share of Solana’s fee revenue traces to speculative trading, memecoins above all, which makes the revenue line high-beta to the exact market segment least likely to survive a deep winter. Ethereum’s fee problem is structural but its demand is diversified; Solana’s fee machine works beautifully and runs on the most flammable fuel in crypto. Neither model is finished.

Fusaka and the second-half Ethereum upgrade path aim at scaling data further without answering value capture, while Solana’s validator economics, where thin margins already pushed the validator count down 68% from its 2023 peak, depend on fee and MEV income holding up.

The other front: stablecoins, payments, and tokenized everything

DEX volume gets the headlines, but the war’s second front may matter more by 2027, because it is the one institutions actually fund: who carries the tokenized economy.

Ethereum’s position is incumbency at scale. Roughly 70% of stablecoin supply, the deep USDC and USDT float that institutional desks require, and essentially the entire first generation of tokenized funds. When Ondo debuted its SEC-aligned tokenized stock model with BlackRock ETF shares this week, the underlying rails were Ethereum-ecosystem by default. Stablecoin legislation cleared the path for bank issuance and for the consortium models now emerging among major institutions, and banks build where the auditors already have coverage, which is one more network effect compounding for the incumbent.

Bitwise has strengthened its proposed spot NEAR ETF with a staking feature in a new SEC filing, helping drive NEAR nearly 12% higher as the token broke above a multi-week downtrend.

According to a revised S-1 registration statement submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Bitwise has amended its proposed spot NEAR ETF for a second time, adding staking as a source of potential rewards alongside the fund’s primary objective of tracking the value of NEAR held by the trust.

The filing also confirms that the ETF is intended to list on NYSE Arca, while The Bank of New York Mellon will act as cash custodian, administrator and transfer agent, with Coinbase Custody safeguarding the fund’s digital assets.

The amendment also expands disclosures covering staking-related tax treatment, redemption liquidity and cryptocurrency market risks. Bitwise has not yet disclosed the ETF’s ticker symbol or management fee, and the proposal remains subject to SEC approval.

ETF filing coincides with a technical breakout

The revised filing arrived as NEAR staged one of its strongest rallies in weeks.

According to data from crypto.news, NEAR Protocol (NEAR) climbed nearly 12% to around $2.04 on July 3, extending a recovery that began earlier in the week. While the ETF amendment alone cannot be credited for the move, it arrived as the token was testing a critical technical level, providing a catalyst that coincided with a bullish breakout already taking shape.

On the four-hour chart, NEAR broke above a descending trendline that had capped every rally since the token peaked near $2.56 in mid-June. The breakout also carried price back above the 61.8% Fibonacci retracement level at roughly $2.04, a level many traders monitor for confirmation that buyers are regaining control after a prolonged correction.

Momentum indicators also turned more constructive. The Moving Average Convergence Divergence indicator maintained a bullish crossover with a rising positive histogram, while the Aroon indicator showed Aroon Up at 100 and Aroon Down near 14, signaling that buyers currently dominate the short-term trend.

If the breakout holds, the next resistance levels lie around $2.14 and $2.24, followed by the $2.36 region. A successful move through those levels could open the way for a retest of the June high near $2.56, while the former breakout area around $1.90 has become the first key support.

Analysts see improving market structure

Adding to the bullish technical picture, analyst Michaël van de Poppe said he increased his NEAR position around $1.82, describing the recent weakness as an attractive accumulation opportunity.

According to van de Poppe, NEAR is “clearly breaking back into an uptrend” after defending support near €1.70 (around $2.00). He added that holding this area could pave the way for a rally toward €2.20-€2.30 (roughly $2.58-$2.70), which he said would strengthen the case for new highs later in the summer.

The improving chart structure broadly aligns with that outlook. After several weeks of setting lower highs, NEAR has now established a higher low, reclaimed a key Fibonacci level and broken through descending resistance.

Although continued buying volume will be needed to confirm the reversal, the combination of Bitwise’s updated ETF filing, strengthening momentum indicators and renewed institutional interest has improved the token’s near-term technical outlook.

Institutional demand for NEAR investment products has also been building elsewhere. Earlier, crypto.news reported that Grayscale filed an amended registration statement for its own proposed spot NEAR ETF, adding another issuer to the growing race to launch regulated investment products tied to the network.

The European Securities and Markets Authority (ESMA) has warned that many prediction market contracts may already fall under existing restrictions on binary options, saying companies cannot avoid financial regulations simply by marketing them as “event contracts.”

In a public statement on Friday, the regulator reminded companies that event contracts meeting the definition of financial instruments are already prohibited from being marketed, distributed or sold to retail investors under national measures implementing ESMA’s 2018 binary options restrictions.

ESMA said the assessment depends on a contract’s characteristics rather than how it is marketed, adding that event contracts with binary outcomes and fixed payouts are likely to qualify as financial instruments subject to the restrictions.

The regulator also told companies that offering qualifying event contracts to professional or institutional clients still requires authorization under the EU’s Markets in Financial Instruments Directive, or MiFID II, regardless of whether retail investors are excluded.

Excerpt from ESMA’s July statement on event contracts. Source: ESMA

The statement does not introduce new restrictions. ESMA said it issued the reminder after observing increased offerings of event contracts and the rapid growth of prediction markets, noting that qualifying binary options have already been subject to national restrictions across the EU since 2018.

Related: StanChart joins ESMA’s first MiCA register update since deadline

US prediction markets face growing legal battle

In the United States, a regulatory battle over prediction markets is unfolding, pitting state gaming regulators against the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) over whether event contracts should be treated as gambling or federally regulated derivatives.

By March, authorities in 11 states had taken legal or regulatory action against platforms including Kalshi and Polymarket. Nevada became the first state to temporarily block Kalshi’s operations, while Arizona brought criminal charges alleging the company was operating an illegal gambling business.

The following month, the CFTC asserted “exclusive jurisdiction” over prediction markets, saying Congress had entrusted the agency with sole authority to regulate commodity derivatives markets, including event contracts. The regulator also said it had sued several states and filed court briefs supporting platforms, including Kalshi.

The CFTC’s April announcement defending its authority over prediction markets. Source: CFTC.gov

The legal battle has continued to escalate. On June 30, a Massachusetts judge allowed state authorities to file an amended complaint against Kalshi in an ongoing lawsuit alleging that the company’s sports-event contracts constitute illegal gambling under state law.

The dispute has also prompted calls for congressional action. Last month, the Indian Gaming Association and American Gaming Association, joined by tribal and labor groups, urged lawmakers to amend the CLARITY Act to explicitly prohibit sports-related event contracts on prediction market platforms, arguing they fall outside the CFTC’s authority and should remain subject to state gambling laws.

Some legal experts believe the growing conflict between federal and state regulators over prediction markets could ultimately be decided by the US Supreme Court.

Magazine: Bitcoin slides to $58K, XRP hits $1 but onchain data promising: Market Moves

Everyone who bought Nvidia in 2023 remembers why it felt like a leap of faith at the time. The AI story was still new, the chart hadn’t caught up yet, and most people waited for proof before buying in. That proof arrived, and the trade that followed became one of the biggest of the decade. Stargate LLM‘s presale sits in that same early window right now. Batch 1 just opened at $0.0005 per token, well ahead of any launch or listing.

Bittensor and Render, two of the AI sector’s most established names, show what that same trade looks like once the proof has already arrived. TAO trades near $250 with a market cap close to $3 billion. TAO trades near $250 as of late June 2026, ranked around #27 to #37 with a market cap close to $3 billion. And Render is holding through a broader market pullback this week.

Stargate LLM: Getting In Before the Chart Exists

Global AI spending is on track to grow from roughly $391 billion in 2025 to more than $1.2 trillion by 2030. That kind of growth tends to reward the people who position early, and Stargate LLM is built to be one of the platforms through which growth flows. It’s not a wrapper riding on top of someone else’s model. It’s a full AI platform in its own right, offering conversational chat, image generation, video generation, private search, and its own agent marketplace, built to stand alongside names like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude rather than orbit around them.

The presale is structured in 10 batches, with the price stepping up at each stage. Batch 1 is open right now at $0.0005 per token, a 50x discount to the confirmed $0.025 launch price. The earlier a batch is bought into, the larger the theoretical multiple to launch, and Batch 1 alone carries a 50x path to listing, 9 batches ahead of where the presale eventually closes. That structure mirrors exactly what early infrastructure investors couldn’t get in 2023: a seat at the table before the breakout moment, not after it.

Token supply is fixed at 150 billion, with no additional minting planned after launch, and only 1% of that supply is set aside for the team. The rest flows to presale participants and to the community that will actually use the platform once it’s live. It’s the kind of allocation that signals a project built around its users first. This is exactly the kind of early window people are searching for when they look for the next 1000x AI crypto, a token priced before the market has had any real chance to weigh in.

Bittensor: A Mature Project Built Around Scarcity

Bittensor has spent the past year building its case around supply. The network capped its total token count at 21 million and completed its first halving in December 2025, cutting new token issuance in half. Bittensor ran its first halving on Dec. 12, 2025, cutting daily emissions from 7,200 to 3,600 TAO against a fixed 21 million cap, the same hard-cap design Bitcoin uses.

TAO daily price chart — June 30 | Source: crypto.news

Roughly 70% of the circulating supply is staked, locking away a large share of the tokens in circulation. It’s a well-established, actively used decentralized machine learning network, and TAO remains one of the most recognized names in AI crypto. Like most projects with a multi-year track record, its price today reflects a market that has already had time to study it closely. 

Render: Real Infrastructure, Growing By the Week

Render connects people who need computing power for AI and rendering work with people who have GPUs sitting idle. The network recently expanded its capacity significantly, adding roughly 60,000 GPUs through a new partnership with Salad Technologies, approved through the project’s own governance process. It’s a genuine, functioning piece of AI infrastructure with real usage behind it.

Prices across the AI token sector dipped together this week amid a broader market pullback. A detailed market piece describes native DeFi, AI, and privacy tokens, including FET, TAO, RENDER, ZEC, and XMR, all falling as risk appetite faded across the board. which is normal for an established asset trading through short-term market cycles. 

The Bottom Line

Bittensor and Render are two of the strongest, most established names building AI infrastructure on-chain today, and both are worth understanding on their own terms. Stargate LLM offers something different: a chance to get positioned at the very start of a project’s story, at Batch 1 pricing, before the market has set the price at all.

For anyone comparing the two paths, established infrastructure with a known track record or an early presale window still ahead of its own chart, both are real ways to be part of the AI crypto trade. They’re just at different points on the same road, and Stargate LLM is at the very beginning of its own.

Explore Stargate LLM:

Website: stargate.org

Buy: own.stargate.com

Telegram: https://t.me/StargatellmOfficial

Twitter/X: https://x.com/stargatellm

Disclaimer: This is a Press Release provided by a third party who is responsible for the content. Please conduct your own research before taking any action based on the content.

Key Highlights

• PEG stock advanced 1.68% amid PSE&G’s weekend storm preparations.
• PSE&G deployed crews and equipment ahead of heat wave and thunderstorm threats.
• Extreme heat warning remained in effect as severe weather loomed over New Jersey.
• Residents advised to prepare emergency supplies and stay away from fallen power lines.
• Elevated air conditioning demand highlighted grid reliability concerns for PSE&G.

Shares of Public Service Enterprise Group (PEG) moved higher as its utility subsidiary PSE&G mobilized resources ahead of extreme heat and potential weekend storms. PEG advanced 1.68% to close at $81.62 during the trading session. The uptick followed the utility’s announcement regarding outage preparedness and anticipated surges in power consumption.

Public Service Enterprise Group Incorporated, PEG

PSE&G Mobilizes Resources Ahead of Weather Threats

PSE&G announced enhanced staffing levels throughout its service area as the holiday weekend approached. The company strategically deployed crews and stockpiled repair materials for rapid response capabilities. The operational strategy prioritized both heat-related strain and potential storm-induced infrastructure damage.

The National Weather Service maintained an Extreme Heat Warning through Saturday evening while simultaneously issuing storm alerts for Friday through Sunday. High winds accompanying thunderstorms posed significant risks to trees and electrical infrastructure across the region.

PSE&G indicated that repair teams would evaluate damage systematically and prioritize restoration efforts. The utility’s strategy focuses on repairing infrastructure that restores electricity to the greatest number of customers initially. Concurrently, customer service operations prepared for increased call volumes.

Public Service Enterprise Group Stock Advances on Operational Readiness

Public Service Enterprise Group equity appreciated as investors responded favorably to the utility’s proactive weather response strategy. The stock movement signaled market confidence in the company’s operational preparedness during peak summer electricity demand periods. Nevertheless, shares retreated modestly in after-hours trading.

PSE&G functions as the state’s premier electric and gas distribution utility serving New Jersey. Public Service Enterprise Group, its parent entity, maintains close ties to grid dependability and energy consumption patterns. Consequently, severe weather developments frequently influence operational performance metrics.

The company has committed substantial capital to electric infrastructure enhancements over recent months. These investments target improved reliability during extreme weather events including storms and prolonged heat episodes. Additionally, the utility maintains that system modernization enables faster crew response following service interruptions.

Residents Advised to Ready Households for Power Disruptions

PSE&G encouraged customers to fully charge mobile phones, essential medical equipment and backup power sources before storm systems arrive. The utility recommended securing patio furniture and loose objects outdoors. Furthermore, it suggested keeping flashlights and fresh batteries readily accessible.

The utility emphasized that all downed electrical wires must be presumed energized. Residents should maintain a minimum distance of 30 feet from any fallen conductor. They should immediately report hazardous conditions to PSE&G while contacting emergency services when imminent danger exists.

PSE&G cautioned against operating gasoline-powered generators indoors, within garages or any confined areas. The company stressed that incorrect generator operation creates serious carbon monoxide poisoning risks. Customers relying on electrically-powered medical devices should enroll in PSE&G’s registry and maintain alternative contingency arrangements.

Heat Wave Intensifies Concerns Over Electricity Consumption

Prolonged extreme heat forces air conditioning systems to operate continuously, substantially increasing electrical draw. PSE&G recommended that customers adjust thermostats to higher settings during absences from residences. The utility also suggested utilizing ceiling fans, closing window coverings, and maintaining clean HVAC filters.

The company directed customers toward available energy conservation programs and consumption monitoring resources. The MyMeter platform enables customers to monitor electricity usage via online accounts or smartphone applications. Accordingly, households can modify consumption patterns before receiving elevated utility statements.

The impending weekend storm threat compounds challenges for an already taxed electrical grid infrastructure. However, PSE&G affirmed that personnel and equipment remain positioned for forecasted conditions. The announcement maintained emphasis on service reliability, public safety, and seasonal power demand management.