As the crypto industry enters what the author calls its 17th year, the basis for competition among public blockchains is changing. In a commentary originally published by Odaily and later carried by MarsBit, the author argues that the race is no longer centered only on fundraising size, total value locked, developer counts or the number of ecosystem projects. The comparison now leans more on protocol revenue, protocol profit, ecosystem scale and the ability to attract new categories of assets.
The article says that after the cycles of DeFi Summer, GameFi Summer, NFT Summer, inscriptions and Meme Summer, the blockchain landscape in 2026 is settling into a structure led by the Ethereum mainnet ecosystem, the BSC ecosystem, Ethereum Layer 2 networks represented by Base and Robinhood Chain, the Solana ecosystem, the Hyperliquid EVM ecosystem, and a long tail of other networks.
Author says Solana has fallen back in 30-day chain revenue rankings
Citing DefiLlama data, the piece says the top 10 blockchains by revenue over the past 30 days include Canton and Tron, but treats those two as special cases: Canton because incentive-driven revenue distorts the comparison, and Tron because stablecoin demand keeps it near the top of the table. Excluding those cases, the article lists Robinhood Chain, Base, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BSC, Hyperliquid L1 and Arbitrum as the more relevant peers.
Within that group, the author says Solana has dropped to No. 6 by revenue, or No. 5 if Canton is removed. The piece adds that Solana’s revenue over the last 30 days is only about one-tenth of Robinhood Chain’s.
That gap leads to the article’s central argument: compared with ecosystems where stock-themed meme assets are driving trading activity and where exchange or platform distribution is built in, Solana needs a fresh path if it wants to remain competitive over a longer stretch.
Path one: expand issuance venues and trading-pair infrastructure
The first proposal is summed up in the article with a blunt phrase that is meant to point to platform building and builder support, not as an insult. The basic idea is that Solana should mobilize more of its own ecosystem participants, especially trading venues, established projects and developers capable of building durable infrastructure.
The author points to earlier Odaily coverage by reporter Golem, who discussed Solana’s difficulties in the stock-themed meme segment and mentioned StonkFun along with tokens such as STONK and ZCAT. The new commentary also references Pump.fun and the custom trading-pair function launched for stock-themed meme asset issuance through Backpack’s Sunrise platform and xStocks. On top of that, Raydium’s LaunchLab now supports any token trading pair on Raydium.
The article treats those developments as signs that Solana has started moving in the right direction by adding more issuance platforms and broadening asset pairing options.
It then compares the landscape across chains. Robinhood Chain has Pons and Long. BSC has Flap and Four.meme. Base has o1.Exchange and Bankr. Solana, in the author’s view, has only recently gotten StonkFun and Pump.fun involved in this newer asset category. For a network once seen as the leading chain for meme coins, the article says that level of movement and incentive support is still not enough.
The piece goes beyond meme coins alone. It argues that Solana should make use of what the author describes as its U.S. compliance advantage by bringing in more high-quality U.S. equities and placing them into tokenized stock liquidity pools, which would widen the range of asset pairs available inside the ecosystem. The article states plainly that if Robinhood Chain can do it, Solana should be able to do it as well, and do it better.
The author also says Solana’s official posture has not been active enough since Hyperliquid helped ignite interest in on-chain perpetual futures DEXs. In the article’s telling, Solana has not pushed hard enough on experimentation, and it has not launched support programs or incentives to encourage ecosystem developers to build related trading venues or new mechanics around stock-themed meme assets and liquidity-pool pairings.
The underlying point is simple: ecosystem growth depends heavily on builders, and the chain needs more of them producing useful platforms rather than relying on narrative alone.
Path two: use investment, acquisitions or revenue-sharing deals to secure distribution
The second proposal centers on alliance building through equity stakes, acquisitions or commercial partnerships.
The article cites several recent transactions. After Intercontinental Exchange, the parent of the New York Stock Exchange, took a stake in OKX, Nasdaq announced a $100 million investment in Payward, the parent company behind crypto exchange Kraken. The piece says that investment lifted Payward’s valuation to $21 billion.
From there, the author asks why a public blockchain such as Solana could not use similar tools, whether minority investments, acquisitions or revenue-sharing agreements, to complete what the article describes as its final missing piece in the trading map.
The commentary also mentions Polymarket’s effort to re-enter the U.S. market, saying it spent $112 million to acquire QCX, a compliant U.S. equities exchange. The article presents that deal as another possible model Solana could follow in building a friendly endpoint for liquidity around Solana-based tokens.
On the compliance front, the piece adds that Hyperliquid’s policy center and official team have held detailed discussions with Kraken as part of efforts to enter the U.S. market in a compliant way. Kraken has said it is working with the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission, or CFTC, and that through Bitnomial, a CFTC-regulated platform, it can offer registered U.S. users certain crypto perpetual products linked to the Hyperliquid market and its underlying Layer 1 blockchain.
The article’s broader claim is that even without a major acquisition, Solana could still work with other crypto exchanges or trading venues. If that support were in place, the author says, Solana ecosystem tokens, whether DeFi projects, meme coins or stock-themed meme assets, could gain something similar to what BSC tokens have with Binance, Base tokens have with Coinbase, and Robinhood Chain tokens have with Robinhood: a recognizable final listing destination.
In the author’s view, that would help Solana avoid the liquidity bottlenecks that come from depending on outside ecosystems or exchanges. It would also create a second growth curve instead of leaving the network stuck around concepts such as a high-performance network, an internet capital market or an AI agent payment network.
Path three: compete harder for builders, traders and strategic leverage
The third idea is framed as putting pressure on competitors. The article explicitly says this section is discussed only from a business and industry competition angle, without making a moral judgment.
The author compares the crypto market to the internet technology sector and argues that, alongside internal development, it is normal in competitive markets to use lawful and compliant tactics that slow rivals and strengthen one’s own position. The commentary breaks that into two directions.
The first is coalition building and competitive positioning. The author suggests Solana could align with the relatively weaker Base and Coinbase camp while maintaining direct competition with Robinhood Chain and Robinhood, as well as BSC and Binance. At the same time, the article says Solana could track, imitate or even closely clone popular rival products, including launchpad platforms and meme coin formats, which it describes as common practice in the Base and BSC ecosystems.
The second is competing for builders and operators. Using Pump.fun’s high-pay recruiting from the fomo platform as an example, the author says Solana could improve economic returns for token developers and creators, similar to the creator-tax model used by Pump.fun. It could also run better-funded trading contests with wider participation, drawing meme traders, crypto traders and key opinion leaders into Solana to build, trade and test new ideas.
The piece goes one step further and says that options in modern competition can range from higher pay and joint ventures to acquisitions, or even the use of regulatory scrutiny to affect the progress of rivals. The article presents that as behavior already seen across the U.S. and Chinese internet sectors, with crypto described as a smaller version of the same internet finance industry logic.
Additional ideas involve toly, market makers and trader rankings
Beyond the three main proposals, the author lists several smaller but more tactical ideas.
One is that Solana co-founder toly could borrow a page from Robinhood CEO Vlad and directly lobby executives at U.S.-listed companies, encouraging them to enter the on-chain tokenized equity segment on Solana as institutions or corporations. Circle is cited as an example already available for reference.
Another is that Solana could work with the fomo platform to create a dedicated Solana meme profitability leaderboard, ranking the top 100 traders in the ecosystem by realized gains from Solana meme coins.
A third suggestion is that Solana could even work with market makers such as Wintermute, GSR and Galaxy to participate in meme-coin activity across rival ecosystems. As a reference point, the article points to LAPTOP, a meme coin recently launched on Base by Hunter Biden, the son of Joe Biden.
The article argues Solana needs a more active stance
In its closing section, the commentary says that from an industry competition standpoint, any method that is legal, compliant and commercially reasonable is available in theory to Solana’s official camp. It adds that the better outcome would be to incubate more high-quality projects, create more innovative formats and bring more liquidity, capital and funding from traditional finance into crypto markets.
The author acknowledges that a more active strategy could lead to more mistakes, but says it is still preferable to standing still. The article argues that Solana is currently constrained by technical upgrades and has also drifted away from community communication, and that this needs to change.
It ends by citing recent remarks from Bonk Guy, who said he had changed his bias against Solana and had turned more bullish because of recent moves by Solana officials and projects in the ecosystem. The article notes that, as a long-term supporter of BONK and USELESS, Bonk Guy’s shift may also reflect frustration that Solana has not moved faster.
The piece closes on a broader industry point: many people want a crypto market that is fairer, more diverse, more innovative and richer in opportunity. In that framework, reviving the Solana ecosystem is a responsibility for Solana builders and projects, and as one of the sector’s major networks, Solana also carries a responsibility to keep building the wider market.