Solana vs Ethereum: Wall Street’s Blockchain Choice

For years, the consensus across both crypto and traditional finance was straightforward: when institutional adoption matured, Ethereum would be Wall Street’s blockchain of choice. As the largest smart-contract network and the ecosystem that shaped programmable finance, Ethereum’s dominance seemed inevitable. However, as institutional tokenization efforts accelerate, a new question has entered mainstream discussion: what if institutions ultimately rely on Solana instead? This speculative scenario reflects a fundamental shift in how market infrastructure is being evaluated, moving beyond developer ecosystems to prioritize performance metrics that align with institutional workflows.

Bitwise CIO Matt Hougan recently described Solana as ‘the new Wall Street,’ arguing that its low-latency execution model aligns more closely with institutional requirements than general-purpose alternatives. This perspective marks a significant evolution from Solana’s early identity, which was shaped by retail speculation, memecoins, and experimental retail applications. The same characteristics that fueled its speculative mania—sub-second finality, negligible fees, and high-performance runtime—are now being reframed as potential foundations for institutional-grade settlement infrastructure.

Solana’s technical advantages are quantifiable and substantial. According to Solscan data, the network can process more than 3,000 transactions per second at an average cost of half a penny. This performance profile stands in stark contrast to Ethereum, which remains constrained at the base layer and relies on rollups to scale throughput and manage costs. The raw throughput numbers have captured the attention of analysts tracking the intersection of blockchains and traditional capital markets, particularly as stablecoin issuers and tokenization firms build increasingly sophisticated products on the network.

However, Solana’s aspirations remain far ahead of its current reality. The blockchain currently averages around 284 ‘trades’ per second in terms of user-initiated value-moving instructions, significantly below its advertised raw throughput capacity. When compared to traditional market infrastructure, the gap becomes even more apparent. Nasdaq executes roughly 2,920 trades per second and processes approximately $463 billion in daily volume, while Solana handles about $6 billion. This substantial difference in economic density highlights the distance between current capability and institutional requirements.

Solana developers claim that upcoming upgrades will optimize validator performance, enhance scheduling, and reduce block contention—advances that could bring the network closer to the reliability profile expected of market infrastructure. As Galaxy Research noted, Solana is evolving toward a cohesive vision of ‘Internet Capital Markets,’ a system capable of supporting the full spectrum of digital financial activity, from retail speculation to enterprise-grade infrastructure and tokenized real-world assets.

The question of what Solana could be worth if Wall Street adopts it meaningfully has prompted new modeling frameworks that treat blockchains as infrastructure rather than speculative equities. Artemis CEO Jon Ma recently published such a model, where value drivers become throughput, cost efficiency, fee capture, and the ability to support high-volume, low-latency financial flows—factors where narrative dominance matters less than pure performance metrics.

Ma’s model predicts the global tokenization market will reach between $10 trillion and $16 trillion by 2030. Under a scenario where Solana captures just 5% of that activity, it could support a market capitalization approaching $880 billion. This projection incorporates factors including annual turnover, projected declines in inflation, and blended revenue rates derived from priority fees, base fees, and Jito tips. While these projections don’t imply inevitability, they highlight how markets may begin assessing blockchains once real-world assets move on-chain at scale.

The growth trajectory of tokenized real-world assets supports this analytical framework. According to Rwa.xyz, tokenized RWAs already total approximately $35.8 billion, nearly double their level from late 2024. As this figure grows, performance and execution costs become increasingly central to the conversation, potentially favoring Solana’s speed, low fees, and ability to scale without relying on external execution layers—the same qualities that once defined its retail culture.

Ethereum’s established strengths—including security, tooling maturity, and regulatory familiarity—remain the default institutional preference for many traditional finance participants. However, the accelerating tokenization trend adds pressure to assess blockchain networks through a new lens that prioritizes transaction capacity and cost efficiency. This evolving evaluation framework creates a competitive dynamic where both networks have distinct advantages: Ethereum with its proven security and developer ecosystem, and Solana with its raw performance capabilities.

The strategic shift in Solana’s positioning signals that the network no longer wants to be merely a fast blockchain but aims to become an execution engine capable of supporting regulated financial operations at scale. Whether Solana can achieve the reliability profile required by institutional participants remains uncertain, but the ambition itself represents a significant development in the blockchain infrastructure landscape. As tokenization continues to gain momentum, the competition between these two approaches to blockchain architecture will likely intensify, with Wall Street’s ultimate choice potentially reshaping the entire crypto valuation framework.