Source: LinkedIn Gabriel Mamou-Mani
Solana won 2025 war because users don't care about decentralization.
It is a hard pill to swallow for the purists.
But the market doesn't care about your ideology. It cares about the product. And looking at the 2025 scoreboard? The market has voted with its wallet.
#1. Solana: $1.4 BILLION in Revenue. #4. Ethereum: $524 Million.
To be fair, let’s strip out consensus votes and look at real user activity: Solana processed ~31 Billion non-vote transactions in 2025. The entire Ethereum Layer 2 ecosystem combined: ~15 Billion.
The "Challenger" is making 3x MORE CASH and processing 2x MORE VOLUME than the "King" and its army combined.
Why? Because Solana understood one fundamental truth about human nature: Users don't want "Censorship Resistance".
Users want Simple, Fast & Cheap.
Ethereum spent years optimizing for "alignment" and "decentralization". They went Modular. They fractured their liquidity across 50 different Layer 2s to keep the L1 pure. Solana? They optimized for Business. They stayed Monolithic. They kept the liquidity unified. They didn't sell a "Rollup-Centric Roadmap for sharding optimisation". They sold 65 MILLION transactions a day.
They became the Apple of Blockchains. While Ethereum was debating philosophy, Solana was printing cash.
And it’s not just Solana. Look at Hyperliquid. $814 Million in Revenue. An App-Chain. A single niche platform. It is beating the entire Ethereum Layer 1 because it solves one specific problem perfectly.
The "Crypto Casino" is closed. The days of valuing a project based on its "Mission Statement" are over.
Stop analyzing Market Cap. START analyzing Cash Flow. Stop optimizing for "Ethos". START optimizing for Revenue.
If you are building in 2026 and your main value proposition is "We are decentralized"... You are already dead.
The market has sobered up. Narratives don't pay the rent. Adoption does.
