‘The year of revenue, assets, and trading’: Ethereum and Solana boast growth in 2025

The two most-used blockchains, Ethereum and Solana, published annual retrospectives on Tuesday, both arguing that 2025 was a significant year in their roadmap as they look to become the dominant blockchain for consumers and institutions. 

“In 2025, Ethereum solidified itself as the secure foundation for our growing digital civilization,” the non-profit Ethereum Foundation wrote on X, outlining “12 themes” that directed the network’s development last year, including trends like institutional adoption and increasing interoperability. 

Solana, for its part, noted the blockchain notched fresh all-time highs in app revenue, unique active wallets, and DEX volumes, among other metrics, even as memecoin volumes dipped about 10%.

Solana also saw record stablecoin growth, with the total supply issued on the blockchain doubling year-over-year to $14.8 billion, powering $11.7 trillion of stablecoin transfers. This is not far off from the $18.8 trillion in stablecoin settlements cited by the Ethereum Foundation. 

One area where Ethereum remains the undisputed leader, however, is in the size of its DeFi ecosystem, which ended the year with over $99 billion total value locked, “over 9x the next-largest L1 ecosystem,” the Ethereum Foundation said. Likewise, Ethereum dominates in prediction markets, another fast-growing blockchain use case with some $20 billion in betting volume on the base layer and L2s. 

Revenue growth

According to the Solana Foundation, applications on the network earned a combined $2.39 billion in revenue, up 46% annually, setting a new high. Seven apps alone saw over $100 million in revenue, including trading platforms Axiom, BullX, Jupiter, Meteora, Photon, and Raydium, as well as memecoin generator Pump.fun.

DEX aggregators like Jupiter, Dflow, Titan, and OKX saw a combined $922 billion in volume, while all Solana-based launchpads saw revenues double to $762 million. About 11.6 million tokens were created, about 105,000 of which “graduated” from launchpad bonding curves.

“The longtail of apps on Solana (apps with under $100m in revenue) earned over $500 million in 2025,” the foundation wrote. “Pro trading platforms earned $940 million, up 44% y/y for a new ATH.”

The Solana Foundation also noted that total network REV, the value recorded from user activity, including tips, reached $1.4 billion, representing 48x growth over two years. Meanwhile, an often cited figure places Ethereum’s equivalent to REV at around $690 million. 

That said, REV remains a debatable figure considering that blockchains are not traditional income-generating businesses. Indeed, both networks are focused on reducing the costs of using the blockchain, with Solana reducing its average transaction fee to $0.017 in 2025, down from $0.025 the year before, while the Ethereum base layer boasted five-year lows and sub-cent fees on Layer 2s.  

Comparable metrics?

While not directly comparable, the Solana Foundation also claimed the number of unique active wallets grew 50% YoY to an average of 3.2 million per day, with 725 million new wallets sending at least one transaction, while base layer Ethereum applications recorded over 244 million unique active wallets in 2025.

Likewise, the two networks’ transactions-per-second figures are difficult to compare, considering the different architectures between a monolithic blockchain like Solana and rollup-centric Ethereum. According to the Ethereum Foundation, total TPS “on all Ethereum rollups reached a combined 5600 TPS average” while Solana averaged about “1054 non-vote TPS.”

This comes as Ethereum developers pushed out two major upgrades in 2025, Pectra and Fusaka, which boosted network throughput and data availability while also laying the groundwork for UX improvements.

“The Pectra and Fusaka upgrades made wallets smarter and more accessible for retail and institutional users, expanding account abstraction and making mobile-native app experiences possible without complex middleware,” the EF wrote. “As we move into 2026, Fusaka’s improvements set the stage for Ethereum’s consumer apps to become phone-native, human-friendly, and ready for mass adoption.”

© 2026 The Block. All Rights Reserved. This article is provided for informational purposes only. It is not offered or intended to be used as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice.