2025 is the year of consolidation, with major layer-1 networks laying the foundation for tools and technologies that will lead to better interoperability and drive real-world financial use cases.
For Ethereum, this means a surge in institutional adoption and steady progress in scaling, while builders increasingly view interoperability as a key challenge heading into 2026. For Solana, the focus is on stress testing the network under real demand and hardening its infrastructure, laying the foundation for deeper financial use cases in the coming year. Together, these two networks provide a look at how industry-leading platforms are preparing for the next wave of adoption.
This shift is important because deeper institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more realistic financial use cases may impact long-term demand, revenue opportunities, and the durability of returns associated with assets built on top of these networks.
Ethereum driving interoperability in 2026
Ethereum’s momentum into 2025 is driven in large part by growing institutional adoption, ranging from spot ETFs to the emergence of digital asset Treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, co-founder of ether.fi, one of the largest heavily collateralized networks, pointed to continued improvements at the protocol level as a key driver, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer more scalable” and that transactions are “very cheap now and will continue to get better.”
He added that progress on Layer 2 interoperability — “making it easier to move assets between Layer 2 and Ethereum” — is “absolutely the right thing to do,” along with broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.
This push for interoperability also resonates 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.
“One word: unity,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent over 5 years making things cheaper and faster, but with a broken user experience and mobility. This is coming to an end.”
He said that recent advances in interoperability technology are laying the foundation for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, predicting that “in 2026, all these siled ecosystems will come back together to create lightning-fast, cost-effective and truly interoperable experiences for users and institutions alike.”
Silagadze said that while ETFs expand the scope of use of Ethereum, they are not enough to allow investors to understand the economic activity happening on the chain.
“ETFs give you access to assets, but they don’t really give you any DeFi exposure or profit opportunities,” he said. He believes DAT fills this gap. “I think that’s where DAT comes in… I think it’s certainly had a positive impact on prices [of ETH]no doubt. “
ETH fell to $1,472 in April, its lowest level this year, but followed the trend of DAT and rebounded to $4,832 by August. According to CoinMarketCap, the current price of ETH is around $3,000.
Looking ahead to 2026, Silagadze, who focuses on Neobank solutions at ether.fi, said he hopes the next phase of Ethereum will be less driven by speculative cycles and more defined by continued scaling combined with tangible day-to-day utility. While infrastructure improvements like cheaper transactions and better layer 2 interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes true adoption will ultimately come from products that are familiar to mainstream users but built entirely on the crypto rails.
“I really believe the intent is, or the adoption is going to come from a lot of crypto, neobank type players,” he said, referring to financial services that combine self-custody, yield and composability in a single user experience.
For Silagadze, this shift requires the ecosystem to move beyond what he sees as an overemphasis on “gambling” driven activities and toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale. He emphasized the importance of expanding the scope of specific services, from tokenized stocks to globally accessible banking tools, arguing that such products will bring continued user growth to Ethereum.
This means “more real-world use cases, whether that’s providing access to tokenized stocks to a wider global audience or access to more banking services such as crypto neobanks, as well as a wider variety of non-gambling use cases,” he said.
In his view, neobank-style platforms can serve as a bridge between the Ethereum on-chain infrastructure and the next wave of users, transforming technological advancements into daily financial utility.
Solana is looking to 2025 to prepare for 2026
For Solana, after a tumultuous but formative 2024, the network appears to have found its footing in 2025. Activity peaked earlier this year, driven largely by memecoin transactions that pushed the network to its limits.
“January has been a crazy month,” said Jito Labs CEO Lucas Bruder, noting that transaction volume has surged and revenue from validators and DeFi protocols has been unusually high. This pressure helps strengthen the network.
Solana is now “super slick” with faster performance and greater capacity than it was a year ago, he said. In 2025, block space increased by about 25%, improving user experience and reducing fees, while a new wave of DeFi teams arrived “very energetically building on Solana.” Bruder believes that this is the year Solana begins to play its long-promised role as a high-throughput financial network.
“2025 is just crazy, it’s like everyone is using Solana,” he said, adding that this is the first time the idea of a “decentralized Nasdaq” is really starting to come to fruition.
For Jito, the goal for 2025 is to double down on infrastructure. The company is focused on BAM, a new product designed to make transaction ordering more transparent. The goal is to “unleash new design space, new markets and new economies” by improving how transactions are ordered and priced, Bruder said. While the technology was high, the payoff was simple: “better apps, better user pricing, and a better user experience.” This work laid the foundation for the work to come.
A key inflection point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the launch of Alpenglow, the long-awaited upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder describes Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, which can significantly improve reliability while drastically reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to fully complete; Bruder said that under Alpenglow, finalization may drop to around one second, meaning transactions become irreversible almost immediately.
This shift has significant implications for high-risk financial activities, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. Alpenglow aims to make Solana more suitable for large markets by strengthening finality guarantees and smoothing network coordination, improvements widely seen as prerequisites for high-risk financial activities. In Bruder’s view, the upgrade is not about incremental performance improvements, but about solidifying Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for what he repeatedly describes as a “truly decentralized Nasdaq.”
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