Ethereum versus Solana: who is winning

Transcript

What about ETH? >> ETH, thank God Tom Lee started buying. I have been a massive pessimist on ETH for uh most of the year and I actually um briefly sold my ETH and got back into it when I saw the the >> show your ETH. Okay. >> Oh yeah. I was I was absolutely frustrated beyond belief with just the lack of caring from the Ethereum Foundation. You know, Vitalic coming out and saying like, you know, don't expect us to go all bronze age and do things and but then tides started shifting a little bit. We got some upgrades. We had um Vitalic coming out and say, hey, look, we're going to have to scale the chain 10x onchain and stuff like that.

But ETH's still broken in its current form. And even 10x scaling isn't going to massively fix ETH in its current form. Now, fees have been low and scaling's been better and stuff progress hasn't made, don't get me wrong. And I've got an ETH bag right now, but the ETH bag is basically an ETH BTC ratio trade. So when it uh we get to 0.05 ETHBTC, I'm out again. And there's a underlying things that have not been structurally fixed with ETH. And Kevin Olirri did a a video on this got a lot of uh press, but I was saying the same thing on live stream Kevin Liry. But when when the crash happened, what happened? ETH fees spiked like $1,000 again. It's unusable when something happens. And that's the time when you need it the most and that's a problem.

That's a real problem that hasn't gone away for ETH. So layer twos great big fan of base and all that stuff. ETH main chain continues to struggle and we have a lot of work still to be done. The big thing that's really changed for ETH is that the buyers who are coming in Tom Lee and Wall Street ETFs and stuff like that which had a major turnaround. And again, you know, sometimes you have to ask yourself the question, do you want to write it? Do you want to be right or do you want to make money? I still think there's a lot of problems with the ETH um foundation and all that stuff. In fact, we had that viral thread go recently uh from an ETH dev who had worked there for six years.

He's getting paid $100,000 a year to work at the Ethereum Foundation for to be a dev on the second most important cryptocurrency, a blockchain worth $400 billion. They cannot keep talent at $100,000 a year. You literally have Meta out here giving a hund00 million dollars for devs to come over from AI companies, which I know it's a very specific situation, but like come on Ethereum Foundation, throw the dude to bone here, man. Give him two or three $400,000 a year. It's not going to make that much of a difference to the Ethereum Foundation. But the fact that they're unwilling to invest in talent like that again makes me pessimistic um at least in the short term about the fundamentals of Ethereum. Tom Lee started buying, ETFs started buying, that changed the wave. I got back in

around the same price that I sold at. It's fine. Doesn't really matter. It's all good. Ride the wave and now we're up massively in profits again. So, yay for that. But I'll sell ETH when the time comes. And I think they've got a lot of soulsearching to do to get back to the um back to the technological edge of innovation, right? Things are moving too slow. Um, whereas you see like Salana, you know, Anatolian crew, those guys are absolutely focused, man. They're they're out there promoting their ecosystem all the time. They're out there pushing the edge of technology. They're working super hard to get the vision of Salana out there. And Vitalik's just not that same kind of leader, right? And, you

know, no shade on Vitalik. He's fine. He can be the nerdy dev leader. But in the world's most competitive industry, you can see why the guys at Salana are getting more and more devs to come over. Um, we actually had a recent dev report. And while the entire Ethereum ecosystem, when you account for all the layer 2s and stuff like that, still has the lead on Salana in total numbers of devs, >> Salana as just one blockchain is very close behind, only about um 20 25% behind in devs. And if you were to just look at Ethereum versus main chain versus Salana, Salana be winning. But it's only when you count all the layer 2s together >> the ETH ecosystem wins. So the trend has been definitely in one direction uh for Salana which we've talked about talked about this last year too interestingly

sort of the Salana versus ETH trade and I still think Salana is massively undervalued compared to Ethereum based on current metrics and market cap and all that stuff. Did you know you can earn Bitcoin without ever buying it? That's where the Gemini credit card comes in. Here's how it works. Earn up to 4% back in Bitcoin on gas, transit, and ride share, 3% on dining, 2% on groceries, and 1% on everything else. Use it just like any other credit card, and you're building a crypto portfolio at the same time. The best part, the Gemini credit card has no annual fee and works anywhere Mastercard is accepted.

When you're approved and spend 3,000 in the first 90 days, you'll get a $200 Bitcoin bonus. spend as usual, earn Bitcoin instead at milkroad.com/gemini. Interesting. So, you think Salana wins the the if if we all had a crystal ball and we knew who was going to win tokenization if we knew, right? If you knew where would stocks be tokenized, private credit, you name the the asset that you're we're going to tokenize. If you knew it'd be the best best trade you one of the best trades you can make in crypto in the next few decades.

>> You think Salana you think Salana wins over Ethereum? >> Feels like it's it's going to be one of the two but it's still too early. Like it could be someone else. Let's I will say that but right now feels more likely. So Salana ETH or someone else. >> Yeah. Well, it could always be somebody else. You could always have somebody else come up and um you know take their place at the at the throne as well. gun to my head. Somebody said, "Hey, you can only invest in one of these two. I'd invest in Salana today." That being said, it's not a zero- sum game actually. And we like to put things out as zero sum games, but there's got to be one definitive take all winner, but it just doesn't work like that. My general feeling has been that you're going to have about four to five blockchains

which capture 90% of the users, 90% of volume transactions DeFi devs all that kind of stuff. That's essentially Ethereum base Salana. Uh, you know, maybe BSC or something like that. It's okay, there you go. The the next 10% captures the next 90% of users, but that's only again four or five blockchains. So, this is like Avalanche and Sooie and stuff like that. And one of those could break out and and displace, you know, BSC or base or something like that. And or just, you know, take a bigger market share of that total 90%.

So essentially what we're saying is that 8 to 10 blockchains are going to capture 99% of users values transaction all kind of stuff and there's hundreds of blockchains. So the 1% are going to be scrambling for a very very tiny piece of the pie and to some extent the market has already chosen who the winners are likely to be. Can things change in the next 5 10 years? Of course they can. But it's hard to get momentum shifted back when things start moving in the right direction, right? Is it um there's a law for it. Basically, the more users you have, the more value you have, the more likely these are going to continue to succeed. And that's basically what's happening right now for the Ethereum ecosystem in Salonus. So, even though I might be pessimistic on what's happening

on the Ethereum main chain, I still think Ethereum's got an incredible place in the entire ecosystem. The layer 2 base, all that stuff's fantastic. So, ETH main chain doesn't need to have massive success in order for Bass to have massive success and win. The only thing is they better hope that Bass never jumps ship and just makes their own chain. >> Yep. Yeah, that would I mean there's a very very big risk risk there. Although at the same time, the bigger it gets, the harder that gets to jump ship, right?

>> Very true. you know, you kind of you got to make that decision sooner rather than later. Let's let's zoom out for a sec. You and I were chat chatting about this before we recorded. It just feels like where are all the investors in crypto this year in a way like you know and and you kind of feel like you're looking over the fence at AI and you're like but then also at the same time it's not not like everyone in AI is winning. And then you look at the S&P and you're like, okay, like it just what's what's your sense of of the the the whole market and all asset classes and sort of the mix right now and and how you think that might where you think

we go from here for the rest of the year and into 2026. >> Yeah, the market's definitely told us to be much more selective with uh betting on any altcoins. It's interesting. If you look from the time that Trump tweeted buy to now, you would have made more money buying Bitcoin than we would have buying the NASDAQ or the S&P 500, which is interesting. Had you bought individual stocks, you bought Irene Energy, for example, why didn't we all just full poured into Irene Energy, it would have been up 10x. But then some altcoins have done that as well. You should have full ported into Hyperlquid and you would have got similar returns. So, it's not to say the returns aren't in crypto right now. But I can definitely understand some of the pessimism from the retail crowd in crypto because so much of what has been

built in crypto is just a lot of A lot of vaporware scams from VCs and stuff like that. And people got tired of playing that game. It's not to say the stock market's all squeaky clean. Certainly is not. >> But you can understand why people may become more pessimistic on some of the crypto stuff. Um, and when you have big leverage flashes like you had the other day where some altcoins literally went to zero in a matter of three minutes, that is scarring for people. Anybody who got hit by that or even retail looking out going, I was going to get back into crypto, but holy cow, you know, the this is a problem. So, there's been a bit of pessimism in that regard and altcoins have underperformed basically entire cycle except for very small areas of

outperformance. you've had, you know, AI agents pop off or XRP go 7x in a month, but those have been much fewer and far between stories. The asset class as a whole, if you look at the others chart, which is the top 10 coins excluded, so all the altcoins after the top 10, it's been a much rougher time for them. They've essentially been in a bare market since 2024 and have really struggled, I think, overall this cycle. But if you look at others versus the BTC chart on the monthly, it's very interesting. They are essentially right now at a mega bottom with a bullish MACD crossover happening.

This has happened only two times previously in crypto. Every time one was in 2017, was in 2021. Both times it happened previously start off the mega biggest mega altcoin bull runs in history. So one thing that I think is working in the favor right now of risk assets particularly altcoins is that the Russell 2000's breaking out. So that's 2,000 lower cap stocks in the US stock market that's breaking out to new all-time highs that just started happening the other day. If you look at the correlation between the Russell and the others, very strong correlation. That's essentially the market saying we're taking more risk in the low cap stocks. We're also going to start taking more risk in the low cap altcoins. But I think the stock markets has a lot more interesting stuff to offer too and with

lower risk and also big upside potential. again, data centers, AI, robotics, biotech, space, man, these are really cool things. These are really cool things. And I've got a big stock portfolio and I have had been building it for years across all kinds of cool stuff. I love it. It's neat. I want to invest in rockets. I want to invest in robots. That's cool stuff. And it's really exciting. People are getting much more excited about that stuff right now. Whereas with crypto, we've kind of found out we've got we do a few things really, really well. Really well. And you know, this is the financial layer of the internet, which is fantastic, but there's a lot of things that we keep trying to plug into crypto that just don't really get people very excited.

Social, Infoi, gaming, and 50 other use cases that just have not really done well. But we found a few things we do do really well. and value settlement. Whether you're talking about using Bitcoin to store value and settling value that way or using Salana or Ethereum as your rails to settle value and stable coins and stuff like that. Great. Very clear. If you've ever sent an international bank transfer, you know how great it is to send stable coins across Salana. It's it's incomparable incomparable experience. So, that's great. We've done we've done uh value settlement really well. We're bringing real world assets on chain. But what's bringing real world assets on chain?

Yeah, okay. We can access more investors and stuff like that, but really it's going to be people taking loans in DeFi and gambling on dog coins and stuff like that, which is fine. Which the primary use case of a lot of the stuff happening in crypto, what's all the most popular stuff right now? It's all speculation. Aside from stable coins, which are gamechanging technology, perplexes, perpetual swap uh exchanges for longing and shorting with futures. Okay, perpex is wildly popular. Prediction markets, we're not going to call it gambling. It's prediction markets. I'm predicting the future for financial gain. Okay, DeFi. DeFi is maybe a little bit different compared to those two because you can, you know, borrow against existing assets and stuff like that. But

in practice, what's that become? You loop things, you loop it 10 times, man, and it becomes another form of financial speculation, too, which is fantastic. We love financial speculation. That's what the world thrives on. So, crypto's got a few very powerful compelling use cases with some coins that have compelling compelling powerful narratives for their tokens like Hyperlquid for example or Pump Fund. >> But a lot of tokens are completely valueist. There's no buybacks. There's no revenue share. Where'd you go look at stocks? Okay, what's the stock doing? Well, they're buying back their shares all time, so the price is going to go up. Great. Or they're going to give me a dividend. There's a reason to hold it.

Great. Look at Uniswap. Great example of a completely useless governance token. you buy unis swap token >> they got to turn the they got to turn it on at some point at some point at some point the regulation is here I think they're just waiting for market structure is my take a market structure >> they might they must at some point they will at some point they I think >> okay let me ask you this because because it sounds like I'm getting the vibe that you're feeling stocks more than crypto more than tokens right now which is this I I I want to give you a hug are you Okay, >> I love stocks. They're great. Again, lots of really interesting things, but I'm still very much balls deep in crypto right now. Don't

>> you still believe the exponential opportunity crypto? And I know it's an AI, too, but it's, you know, that's harder to invest in and there's not a lot of opportunity there. You're going to go private, right? >> Yeah, that's right. So, like right now, for example, I'm trying to get into um some pre-market stuff for like Appronic and Figure AI, but like the the price tags are super big and it's very opaque markets and there's almost no liquidity and so it's really difficult to get sort of exposure to this kind of stuff. >> So, I I I don't want to come off as being pessimistic on crypto. I think the market's been very pessimistic on crypto for a very clear amount of reasons. And I'm, >> let's say, pessimistic on most coins in the market, but I kind of always have

been. Most of it is Most of it's always been >> And that's just everybody knows that. You've been in crypto for a while. It's just the simple facts. >> Yeah. >> There's probably a hundred or so, let's say, highly investable assets in the entirety of the cryptocurrency market and maybe even hundreds being generous. But those hundred are really good. >> Be generous. >> Yeah, that's right. >> No, I think you're Yeah. Yeah. >> But those hundred are really good and really investable. And this is the thing is >> we come to the cryptocurrency market. I'm always saying this. If you come to the cryptocurrency market for volatility, you come here because you want to outperform the S&P 500, the NASDAQ. You come here because you want to outperform individual stocks. And there's been some incredible moves in individual stocks against stuff like Irene Energy or even some of the stocks

that US government's buying now. Like there's been some huge moves, okay? But but what have we seen over the last two three years? Okay, since the bottom of the bare market, we've had insane things happen. Pepe go from $300,000 to billions, right? We've had AI agents go from zero to billions. we've had. So, the amount of opportunity in crypto that's available to anyone anywhere is intense and the volatility is a double-edged sword because volatility burns a lot of people and it puts a lot of people off in crypto. But if you are comfortable with the volatility and I feel like after I've been in crypto since uh 2017 and after all that time, nothing really bothers me anymore. I it

just I I wake up and I see like I don't know a monumental flash. >> What you tell your wife and your kids? You're like >> you you you pooped on the floor. Nothing bothers me. I'm I'm in crypto. >> Did Did you see the leverage class crash last week and this is nothing? [Laughter] >> But it's true though. The longer you're in this market, the more comfortable you become with the volatility, the more anticipatory you become with the fact that there are regular disgusting crashes. And >> this is the thing. The volatility is the price that you pay for performance. Okay? And yes, there are long periods of time when absolutely nothing happens in crypto. And then there are short periods of time when everything happens in crypto. And if you zone out and you walk away and you just buy a bunch of index

funds, you're not going to get the upside performance. Okay? But it shakes a lot of people out. Most people are not ready for this kind of stuff. If you come from buying gold, bonds, and stocks into crypto, it's like you've walked from like, I don't know, some kind of like normal place to like some back alley crack zone where like everything's on fire and you're like, what's going on back here? We're making money, man. That's what we're doing, >> but then somebody rolls through in a Ferrari and you're like, how did how did that happen? >> Yeah, we're getting we're going 100x long, man. Let's go. Want insights on what's moving crypto markets and how we're trading each event? Subscribe to our channel and join the Milk Road daily and pro newsletters and start investing like

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