Ethereum and Solana set the stage for 2026’s DeFi reboot

The year 2025 has emerged as a year of consolidation, with major layer-1 networks laying the groundwork for the tooling and technology that will lead to better interoperability, as well as pushing forward with real-world financial use cases.

For Ethereum, that meant a surge in institutional adoption and steady progress on scaling, while builders increasingly looked toward interoperability as the key challenge heading into 2026. For Solana, the focus was on stress-testing the network under real demand and hardening its infrastructure, setting the stage for deeper financial use cases in the year ahead. Together, the two networks offer a glimpse into how the industry’s leading platforms are positioning themselves for the next wave of adoption.

This shift matters because deeper institutional adoption, better interoperability, and more real-world financial use cases could influence long-term demand, yield opportunities, and the durability of returns tied to the assets built on top of these networks.

Ethereum’s 2026 push towards interoperability

Ethereum’s momentum in 2025 has been driven in large part by growing institutional adoption, including from spot ETFs driving up to the emergence of digital asset treasuries (DATs). Mike Silagadze, the cofounder of ether.fi, one of the largest restaking networks, pointed to ongoing improvements at the protocol level as a key enabler, noting that the network is focused on “making the Ethereum mainnet layer one more scalable,” with transactions already “super cheap now and will continue to get better.”

He added that progress on layer-two interoperability — “making it easier to move assets across layer twos and Ethereum” — has been “exactly the right stuff to work on,” alongside broader efforts to advocate for institutional adoption.

That push toward interoperability is also resonating with builders across the Ethereum ecosystem. Alex Cutler, CEO of Dromos Labs, the team behind Base’s largest decentralized exchange, Aerodrome, said the next wave of Ethereum upgrades marks a turning point after years of fragmentation.

“In a word: unification,” Cutler said. “We’ve spent 5+ years making things cheaper and faster, but in doing fractured UX and fragmented liquidity. That’s about to end.”

He said recent advancements in interoperability technology are setting the stage for a major shift in Ethereum DeFi, predicting that “2026 will be the year all of these siloed ecosystems come back together to create a lightning-fast, cost-efficient and truly interoperable experience for users and institutions alike.”

While ETFs have expanded access to ether, Silagadze said they fall short of exposing investors to the economic activity happening onchain.

“The ETFs let you have access to the asset, but they don’t really give you any exposure to DeFi or the earning opportunities,” he said, arguing that DATs fill that gap. “I think that’s where the DATs come in… and I think it certainly had a positive impact on the price [of ETH], no question.”

ETH fell to $1,472 in April, the lowest this year, but bounced back $4,832 by August as DATs were trending. Now ETH sits at roughly $3,000, according to CoinMarketCap.

Looking ahead to 2026, Silagadze, who spends his time at ether.fi focusing on neobank solutions, said he hopes Ethereum’s next phase is defined less by speculative cycles and more by continued scaling paired with tangible, everyday utility. While infrastructure improvements like cheaper transactions and better layer-two interoperability lay the groundwork, he believes real adoption will ultimately come from products that feel familiar to mainstream users but are built entirely on crypto rails.

“I really believe that the intent is, or that the adoption is going to come from a lot of these crypto, neobank type players,” he said, pointing to financial services that combine self-custody, yield, and composability in a single user experience.

For Silagadze, that shift requires the ecosystem to move beyond what he sees as an overemphasis on “gambling”-driven activity and toward applications that solve real financial problems at scale. He emphasized the importance of expanding access to concrete services, from tokenized equities to globally accessible banking tools, arguing that these kinds of products are what will bring sustained user growth to Ethereum.

That means “more real world use cases, whether it’s giving access to tokenized stocks to a broader, global audience, access to more banking services like crypto neobank, but more kinds of non-gambling use cases,” he said.

In his view, neobanking-style platforms could serve as the bridge between Ethereum’s on-chain infrastructure and the next wave of users, translating technical progress into everyday financial utility.

Solana was heads down for 2025 to prepare for 2026

For Solana, after a volatile but formative 2024, the network appeared to find its footing in 2025. Activity peaked early in the year, driven largely by memecoin trading that pushed the network to its limits.

“January was a really crazy month,” said Lucas Bruder, the CEO of Jito Labs, pointing to surging transaction volumes and unusually high revenue for validators and DeFi protocols. That pressure helped harden the network.

Compared to a year earlier, Solana is now “super buttery smooth,” he said, with faster performance and meaningfully more capacity. Block space increased roughly 25% in 2025, improving user experience and lowering fees, while a fresh wave of DeFi teams arrived “very energized to build on Solana.” The result, Bruder argued, was a year in which Solana’s long-promised role as a high-throughput financial network began to take place.

“2025 was just crazy, like everyone was using Solana,” he said, adding that it was the first time the idea of a “decentralized NASDAQ” truly started to materialize.

For Jito, 2025 was defined by doubling down on infrastructure. The firm focused on BAM, a new product designed to make transaction sequencing more transparent. The goal, Bruder said, was to “unlock new design spaces and new markets and new economies” by improving how transactions are ordered and priced. While highly technical, the payoff is straightforward: “better applications, better pricing for users, and a better user experience.” That work sets the stage for what comes next.

A key inflection point for the network is expected to arrive in 2026 with the rollout of Alpenglow, a long-anticipated upgrade to Solana’s consensus mechanism. Bruder described Alpenglow as a fundamental simplification of how the network agrees on blocks, one that should materially improve reliability while sharply reducing confirmation times. Today, Solana transactions typically take 12 to 13 seconds to fully finalize; under Alpenglow, Bruder said, finalization could drop to around one second, meaning transactions become effectively irreversible almost immediately.

That shift has significant implications for high-stakes financial activity, where fast, deterministic settlement is critical. By tightening finality guarantees and smoothing out network coordination, Alpenglow is designed to make Solana better suited for large markets, with those improvements widely viewed as prerequisites for high-stakes financial activity. In Bruder’s view, the upgrade is less about incremental performance gains and more about solidifying Solana’s role as the infrastructure layer for what he repeatedly described as a “truly decentralized NASDAQ.”

Read more: Solana Set for Major Overhaul After 98% Votes to Approve Historic ‘Alpenglow’