Ethereum Added 16K Developers in 2025 While Solana Added 11K and Generated 2.4B in App Revenue - The Numbers Tell a More Nuanced Story

General
1

I’ve been watching the ETH vs SOL narrative war play out on Twitter for months now, and I’m increasingly frustrated by how reductive both sides have become. So I spent this week pulling together the actual data from Electric Capital’s Developer Report, Messari’s State of Solana Q3, and Artemis analytics to see what the numbers really tell us. The answer is more nuanced than either camp wants to admit.

The Developer Numbers

Let’s start with raw developer counts, since this is where I live:

  • Ethereum has 31,869 total active developers as of September 2025, making it by far the largest developer ecosystem in crypto.
  • Solana has 17,708 total active developers - roughly 56% of Ethereum’s count.

But the growth story is more interesting than the absolute numbers:

  • Ethereum added 16,181 new developers from January to September 2025. That’s an enormous influx, driven largely by L2 development, account abstraction tooling, and the post-Pectra upgrade cycle.
  • Solana added 11,534 new developers in the same period, representing 83% year-over-year growth. That growth rate is genuinely impressive.

The takeaway? Ethereum is still the default ecosystem for blockchain development, but Solana is closing the gap faster than most people realize. The 83% YoY developer growth rate for Solana versus Ethereum’s roughly 50% rate means the dynamic is shifting, even if the absolute gap remains large.

The Revenue and Usage Story

Now here’s where things get uncomfortable for the “Ethereum is obviously better” crowd. Solana’s application layer is generating real economic activity at a pace that Ethereum L1 simply isn’t matching:

  • Solana apps generated $2.39 billion in revenue over the past year, a 46% year-over-year increase. That’s protocol-level revenue flowing to applications built on the network.
  • Solana daily active wallets hit 3.2 million, up 50% year-over-year. That’s not just bot activity - wallet diversity metrics confirm genuine user growth.
  • Solana DEX volume reached $1.5 trillion annualized, up 57% year-over-year. That’s real trading activity driving real fee revenue.
  • Solana’s stablecoin supply doubled to $14.8 billion, reflecting genuine capital inflows rather than just speculative activity.

These aren’t vanity metrics. They represent actual economic value being created on the Solana network, and they deserve acknowledgment from anyone who cares about the health of the broader crypto ecosystem.

Why This Isn’t a Zero-Sum Game

Here’s what I keep trying to explain to people who want to reduce this to “ETH good, SOL bad” or vice versa: these ecosystems serve fundamentally different purposes, and both can succeed.

Ethereum leads in:

  • Infrastructure layer security and decentralization (over 950,000 validators)
  • Institutional adoption (BlackRock’s BUIDL fund, the entire RWA tokenization stack)
  • Composable L2 ecosystem (Arbitrum, Optimism, Base, zkSync, Scroll, Starknet)
  • Smart contract maturity and battle-tested DeFi protocols
  • Developer tooling depth (Hardhat, Foundry, Tenderly, Slither, etc.)

Solana leads in:

  • Consumer application development and UX
  • User engagement and daily active usage metrics
  • Application-level revenue generation
  • Transaction speed and cost efficiency for retail users
  • Mobile-first development (Saga, Blinks, Actions)

The structural differences matter. Ethereum chose a rollup-centric roadmap that deliberately pushes execution to L2s. This means L1 metrics will always look “worse” in terms of user activity compared to a monolithic chain like Solana. But that’s a design choice, not a failure.

The Narrative Trap

What concerns me most is how narrative-driven the crypto market has become. People look at the ETH/SOL price ratio and conclude that Ethereum is “losing.” But price action reflects market sentiment and momentum, not necessarily underlying value creation.

When you compare the two ecosystems honestly:

  • Ethereum’s total ecosystem (L1 + all L2s) has more users, more TVL, more developer activity, and more institutional capital than Solana.
  • Solana’s L1 has better UX, faster transactions, cheaper fees, and higher app-level revenue generation than Ethereum’s L1.

Both statements are true simultaneously. The question isn’t “which one wins?” but rather “what if both can succeed for different use cases?”

I’d genuinely love to hear perspectives from people who have built on both chains. What does the developer experience actually feel like? And for the traders and analysts among us - do the fundamentals even matter anymore, or is it all narrative?

Data sources: Electric Capital Developer Report 2025, Messari State of Solana Q3 2025, Artemis Analytics, DefiLlama, Token Terminal

2

Brian, thank you for actually pulling the data together instead of just vibing. I’ve been building on both Ethereum and Solana for the past two years and I think my experience mirrors what your numbers show, but with some important texture that the data alone doesn’t capture.

The Solana DX for consumer apps is genuinely better right now. When I built a simple NFT minting dApp on Solana last year, I went from zero to production in about 10 days. The Anchor framework, the tight integration with wallets like Phantom, the sub-second finality - it all just works for the kind of “user clicks a button and something happens” applications that drive consumer adoption. My users didn’t even realize they were interacting with a blockchain, and that’s exactly what good UX should feel like.

But when I tried to build a complex lending protocol on Solana, I hit walls that don’t exist on Ethereum. The tooling for formal verification is still immature. The debugging experience when you hit a BPF error is genuinely painful compared to Hardhat’s stack traces. And the composability story - while improving - still isn’t at the level where I can trustlessly compose with five other protocols in a single transaction the way I can on Ethereum with flash loans and callback patterns.

The fragmentation problem on Ethereum is real though, and it’s hurting the developer story more than people acknowledge. Right now, if someone asks me “how do I build on Ethereum?” I have to ask them 15 follow-up questions. Which L2? Do you need cross-chain messaging? Which bridge? Are your users on Base or Arbitrum? Do you need to handle deposits from mainnet? Each answer leads to a different tech stack, different deployment pipelines, different monitoring tools.

Compare that to Solana where the answer is just “install Anchor, deploy to mainnet.” There’s a clarity to it that I think explains the 83% developer growth rate Brian mentioned. New developers want a clear path, not a decision tree.

I still believe Ethereum’s approach will win long-term for the applications that truly matter - institutional finance, large-scale DeFi, anything that requires maximal security guarantees. But we’re losing the “first five minutes” developer experience battle, and that matters more than we want to admit. The developers we lose to Solana in their first week might never come back, even when they hit Solana’s ceilings later.

3

Great thread, Brian. Let me put on my business hat here because the revenue comparison is the part that most people get wrong.

Solana’s $2.4B in app revenue is impressive, but you need to look at where it’s coming from. When you break down Solana’s application-level revenue, a disproportionate share comes from memecoin-related activity. Pump.fun alone generated over $500M in fees. Raydium and Jupiter combined for another massive chunk, and a significant percentage of their volume is speculative memecoin trading rather than productive DeFi activity like lending, borrowing, or real yield generation.

I’m not saying that revenue doesn’t count - money is money. But as someone who’s raised capital for three startups, I can tell you that investors (and business analysts) draw a sharp distinction between sustainable revenue and cyclical revenue. Memecoin trading surges during bull markets and collapses during bear markets. We saw this play out in 2022 when Solana’s on-chain activity fell off a cliff.

Compare that to Ethereum’s revenue profile, which is more diversified but grows slower:

  • Aave generates consistent lending revenue regardless of market conditions
  • Lido’s staking yield is structural, not speculative
  • Uniswap’s volume is increasingly driven by institutional-grade pairs (ETH/USDC, WBTC/ETH) rather than meme tokens
  • RWA protocols like Ondo and Centrifuge generate revenue from real-world financial activity

The total numbers look smaller for Ethereum L1 because value has migrated to L2s. But the quality of that revenue is fundamentally different. It’s like comparing a restaurant that does huge numbers during football season versus one that has steady daily traffic year-round. Both are valid businesses, but they have very different risk profiles.

The sustainability question matters for builders. If you’re a startup deciding where to build, you need to ask: will my users still be here in 18 months? If your app depends on memecoin volume, that’s a real risk. If it depends on institutional stablecoin flows or lending markets, the Ethereum ecosystem gives you more structural certainty.

That said, I’ll give credit where it’s due - Solana’s consumer apps like StepN, Helium, and DRiP have shown that real, non-speculative use cases can thrive on the network. The $2.4B number isn’t all memes, and pretending it is would be dishonest. The question is what percentage is durable, and I think it’s lower than the bulls claim but higher than the bears admit.

4

Brian, I appreciate the balanced take but I want to push back on something - the implicit assumption that fundamentals should eventually be reflected in price. As someone who spent years on a trading desk before going full crypto, I can tell you that’s a comforting belief but not always how markets work.

Markets are forward-looking. They price growth rates, not absolute numbers. Ethereum having 31,869 developers versus Solana’s 17,708 tells you where we are. But the market doesn’t pay for where we are - it pays for where we’re going. Solana’s 83% YoY developer growth versus Ethereum’s ~50% is a derivative signal that the market picks up on. If you’re pricing a token based on future ecosystem value, the chain growing faster gets the premium, even if the other chain is larger in absolute terms.

This is why the ETH/SOL ratio keeps falling despite ETH having better “fundamentals” on paper. It’s the same dynamic you see in equities - high-growth companies trade at premium multiples to mature blue chips. Solana is priced like a growth stock; Ethereum is priced like a value stock. And in crypto, growth has historically outperformed value by a massive margin.

Some uncomfortable data points for the ETH bulls:

  • The ETH/SOL ratio has declined from 30x in early 2024 to roughly 12x today. That’s a 60% compression.
  • SOL has outperformed ETH in 11 of the last 14 months.
  • Institutional flows into SOL-adjacent products have grown faster than ETH products on a percentage basis.
  • The Solana ETF narrative is providing a fresh catalyst that ETH already played out.

The narrative momentum is real and it compounds. When SOL outperforms, more traders allocate to SOL, which drives more outperformance, which attracts more developers, which generates more on-chain activity, which justifies the higher price. It’s a reflexive loop that George Soros would love.

Now, does this mean Ethereum is doomed? Absolutely not. I still hold ETH and I think it’s structurally undervalued relative to its security guarantees and institutional moat. But “undervalued” is not the same as “will outperform.” The market can stay irrational longer than your conviction can stay solvent. Right now, narrative momentum favors Solana, and the ETH/SOL ratio may have further to fall before it finds a bottom, regardless of developer counts or TVL comparisons.

The question Brian should really be asking isn’t “do fundamentals matter?” - it’s “when do fundamentals matter?” And the honest answer in crypto is: usually only after narrative exhaustion, which we haven’t seen yet for the Solana thesis.

5

Brian, I love the data-driven approach but I think there’s a fundamental framing problem with the comparison that nobody in this thread has addressed yet: the numbers you’re citing for Ethereum represent only L1, while Solana’s numbers represent its entire ecosystem. When you correct for this, the gap is dramatically wider than your analysis suggests.

Let me lay out the “Ethereum ecosystem” framework:

When we talk about “Ethereum developers,” we should include everyone building on:

  • Ethereum L1: The base layer, ~31,869 developers as you cited
  • Arbitrum: ~4,200 active developers, the largest L2 by TVL
  • Optimism / OP Stack: ~3,800 developers across the Superchain ecosystem (including Base)
  • Base: ~5,100 developers - arguably the fastest-growing dev ecosystem in all of crypto right now
  • zkSync: ~2,400 developers building on ZK rollup architecture
  • Starknet: ~1,900 developers (Cairo/Starknet-specific)
  • Scroll, Linea, Polygon zkEVM, Mantle, and others: collectively another ~4,000+

When you add L2 developers to Ethereum’s total, you get somewhere north of 50,000 active developers building on Ethereum-compatible infrastructure. That’s not 31K vs 17K - it’s more like 50K+ vs 17K, roughly a 3:1 ratio. The narrative that “Solana is catching up to Ethereum in developer count” only works if you artificially exclude all L2 development from Ethereum’s ecosystem.

The same logic applies to user metrics. Brian cited Solana’s 3.2M daily active wallets. That’s impressive in isolation. But look at the Ethereum ecosystem holistically:

  • Base alone has 2.8M daily active addresses
  • Arbitrum adds another 1.2M
  • Optimism mainnet contributes ~800K
  • Ethereum L1 has ~400K daily active addresses
  • Together with smaller L2s, the Ethereum ecosystem exceeds 6M daily active addresses

I propose we adopt a standard framework for these comparisons:

Metric Ethereum Ecosystem (L1+L2s) Solana
Active Developers ~53,000+ ~17,708
Daily Active Addresses ~6M+ ~3.2M
Total TVL ~$85B+ ~$12B
Stablecoin Supply ~$110B+ ~$14.8B

The reason this matters isn’t tribalism - it’s analytical honesty. Ethereum made a deliberate architectural choice to scale through rollups. Measuring Ethereum by L1-only metrics and then comparing it to a monolithic chain is like measuring Amazon’s revenue but excluding AWS, Prime, and Marketplace because they’re “separate business units.” They’re all part of the same economic system secured by the same settlement layer.

Now, I’ll be the first to admit this framework has its complications. L2 developers sometimes build on multiple L2s simultaneously, so there’s double-counting risk. And some L2 activity is genuinely independent of Ethereum’s value accrual. But even with conservative adjustments, the Ethereum ecosystem comparison to Solana is far more lopsided than the L1-only numbers suggest.

Chris’s point about growth rates is valid even under this framework - Solana is growing faster percentage-wise. But growing faster from a smaller base while the larger ecosystem keeps expanding in absolute terms isn’t the clear-cut victory the market seems to be pricing in.