The year 2025 has become a year of consolidation, with major Layer 1 networks laying the foundation for tools and technology that will lead to better interoperability, as well as driving real-world financial use cases.
For Ethereum, that meant a surge in institutional adoption and steady progress in scaling, while builders increasingly looked toward interoperability as the key challenge heading into 2026. For Solana, the focus was on testing the network on real demand and strengthening its infrastructure, setting the stage 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 shift is important because deeper institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more real-world financial use cases could influence the long-term demand, performance opportunities, and durability of returns tied to assets built on these networks.
Ethereum’s push towards interoperability in 2026
Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been largely driven by growing institutional adoption, from the push for spot ETFs to the rise of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, co-founder of ether.fi, one of the largest restoration networks, pointed to continued improvements at the protocol level as a key enabler, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer more scalable,” with transactions that are already “super cheap now and will continue to get better.”
He added that progress on layer two interoperability – “facilitating the movement of assets between layers two and Ethereum” – has been “exactly the right thing to work on,” along with broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.
That 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 a word: unification,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent more than 5 years making things cheaper and faster, but making for a fractured user experience and fragmented liquidity. That’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 siled ecosystems come back together to create a lightning-fast, cost-effective, and truly interoperable experience for users and institutions alike.”
While ETFs have expanded access to ether, Silagadze said they fail to expose investors to the economic activity occurring on-chain.
“ETFs allow you to have access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or profit opportunities,” he said, arguing that DATs fill that gap. “I think that’s where the DATs come in… and I think it certainly had a positive impact on the price. [of ETH]no doubt.”
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, the lowest level this year, but recovered to $4,832 in August as DATs were trending. Now ETH sits at approximately $3,000, according to CoinMarketCap.
Looking ahead to 2026, Silagadze, who spends his time at ether.fi focusing on neobanking solutions, said he expects Ethereum’s next phase to be defined less by speculative cycles and more by continuous scale combined with tangible everyday utility. While infrastructure improvements such as cheaper transactions and better layer two interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes real adoption will ultimately come from products that are familiar to mainstream users but are built entirely on crypto rails.
“I really think that the intent, or that the adoption, will come from a lot of these neobank-type crypto players,” he said, pointing to financial services that combine self-custody, performance and composability into a single user experience.
For Silagadze, that shift requires the ecosystem to move beyond what he sees as an overemphasis on “gaming”-driven activity and toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale. He emphasized the importance of expanding access to concrete services, from tokenized stocks to globally accessible banking tools, arguing that these types of products are what will bring sustained user growth to Ethereum.
That means “more real-world use cases, whether it’s giving access to tokenized stocks to a broader global audience, access to more banking services like crypto neobanking, but 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, translating technical progress into everyday financial utility.
Solana turned upside 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 at the beginning of the year, driven largely 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 volume and unusually high revenue for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped strengthen the network.
Compared to last year, Solana is now “super buttery smooth,” he said, with faster performance and significantly greater capacity. Block space increased by approximately 25% in 2025, improving user experience and reducing fees, while a new wave of DeFi teams arrived “with a lot of energy to take advantage of Solana.” The result, Bruder argued, was a year in which Solana’s long-promised role as a high-performing financial network began to materialize.
“2025 was crazy, like everyone was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” was really starting to materialize.
For Jito, 2025 was defined with 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. While it is very technical, the reward is simple: “better apps, better prices for users, and a better user experience.” That work sets the stage for what comes next.
A key turning point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the launch of Alpenglow, a long-awaited update to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, a simplification that should materially improve reliability while dramatically reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to fully complete; Under Alpenglow, Bruder said, completion could slow to around a second, meaning transactions become effectively irreversible almost immediately.
That change has important implications for high-risk financial activity, where a quick and deterministic solution is essential. By strengthening finality guarantees and softening network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana more suitable for large markets, and those improvements are widely seen as prerequisites for high-risk financial activity. In Bruder’s view, the upgrade has less to do with incremental performance gains and more to do with solidifying Solana’s role as an infrastructure layer for what he repeatedly described as a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”
Read more: Solana prepares for a major reform after 98% of the votes to approve the historic ‘Alpenglow’
