Ethereum
ETH
Solana
SOL
Ethereum vs Solana
Last 7 days, both indexed to zero
Each line starts at zero seven days ago and shows the percentage move since, so the two are on the same scale regardless of what one coin costs. Seven days is a week, not a trend.
| ETH | SOL | |
|---|---|---|
| Price A higher price per coin is not a bigger asset — it is the same value cut into fewer pieces. | $1,862.61 | $75.24 |
| Market cap Price multiplied by circulating supply. The closest thing to "how big is this". | $224.78B (larger) | $43.82B |
| Rank by market cap | #2 (larger) | #7 |
| Change, 24h | ▼0.30% | ▼0.60% |
| Change, 7 days | ▼0.40% | ▲1.80% |
| 24h volume How much actually changed hands. Thin volume against a large market cap means the price is easier to move than the cap suggests. | $6.58B (larger) | $1.25B |
| Daily turnover Volume as a share of market cap — how much of the asset trades in a day. | 2.93% (larger) | 2.86% |
| Circulating supply | 120,682,036 ETH | 582,481,317 SOL (larger) |
| Supply cap A hard cap and an uncapped supply are different designs, not a better and a worse one — what matters is whether issuance is predictable. | No fixed cap | No fixed cap |
| Below all-time high How far each sits under its own record price. It says where the price has been, not where it is going. | ▼62.34% | ▼74.35% |
| All-time high | $4,946.05 Aug 2025 | $293.31 Jan 2025 |
A highlighted figure is simply the larger of the two. It is marked on size, liquidity and supply — where bigger is a fact — and deliberately not on price or on percentage change, where "bigger" would be us implying a winner.
How Ethereum and Solana actually differ
Both run applications. They disagree about what to optimise, and the disagreement is architectural rather than a matter of tuning.
Ethereum treats the base layer as something that must stay cheap to verify, so it keeps blocks small and pushes activity to layer-2 rollups that batch their work and settle back to it. That is why Ethereum's own fees can be high while transactions on an Arbitrum or a Base are trivial: you are meant to be on the rollup. The cost is fragmentation — assets, liquidity and users end up spread across chains that do not automatically talk to each other.
Solana rejects that split. It runs one global state at high throughput with fees measured in fractions of a cent, which is why order-book trading, payments and high-frequency applications tend to land there. The price is hardware: validating Solana demands far more than validating Ethereum, which puts the validator set in fewer hands, and the chain has suffered outages — several in 2021 and 2022, and a five-hour halt in February 2024 — where the network stopped producing blocks entirely.
Neither limitation is cosmetic. Ethereum asks you to accept a fractured experience in exchange for a base layer almost anyone can verify. Solana asks you to accept a heavier, more concentrated validator set, and the possibility that the chain stops, in exchange for one fast place where everything is. Both have inflation, both depend on staking services holding a large share of stake, and both have lost user funds to application-level bugs.
What each one is
Ethereum
Ethereum is a programmable blockchain launched in 2015 by Vitalik Buterin and a group of co-founders. Where Bitcoin tracks who owns what, Ethereum runs code: smart contracts that execute exactly as written, which is what most stablecoins, lending protocols and NFTs are actually built on.
Solana
Solana is a high-throughput blockchain launched in 2020 by Anatoly Yakovenko, built around a straightforward bet: instead of moving activity to secondary layers, make the base chain fast enough to handle it directly.
Where each one lives
Ethereum
Native asset. ETH has no token contract — it is the asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
Solana
Native asset. SOL has no token contract — it is the asset of its own chain, not a token issued on someone else's.
Whichever you hold, holding it yourself is the same problem
Both of these can sit on an exchange, and on an exchange neither of them is yours in the way people assume. If you decide to hold either one properly, this is the category that does it — devices that keep the keys off any internet-connected machine.
All hardware wallets we list → Some listings earn us a commission. That buys position on a list and nothing else — our rules, in writing.
We do not know your position, your timeframe or your tolerance for losing money, and any page that claims to answer this question without knowing those things is selling something. What we can do is make sure the facts above are current and that nothing on this page was paid for. Both of these assets can fall a long way.
Other comparisons
Figures for Ethereum and Solana synced 87s ago from CoinGecko and shown in USD. This page is market information and education, not financial advice, and nothing on it is a recommendation to buy or sell ETH or SOL. Both can lose value.