Solana Flips Ethereum In New Developer Activity: Is SOL The True Consumer Chain For 2026?
Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) achieved what seemed impossible just years ago. In the first nine months of 2025, Solana Inc. added 11,534 new developers while Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) brought on 16,181, according to Electric Capital’s developer tracker. While Ethereum still leads in total developer count with 31,869 active developers globally, Solana’s 17,708 developers are building something fundamentally different. They’re not focused on complex financial instruments or enterprise blockchain experiments. They’re building payment systems, gaming platforms, and consumer applications that regular people actually use daily.
The Numbers Tell A Consumer Story
While Ethereum maintains its crown for overall developer activity, Solana’s rapid growth signals a fundamental shift. The network processed over 100 million transactions daily throughout 2025, powered by approximately 500,000 daily active wallets. Compare that to Ethereum’s mainnet activity, which has increasingly migrated to Layer 2 solutions, fragmenting the user experience and complicating the value proposition for everyday consumers.
Protocol revenue reveals where real economic activity happens. Solana’s revenue exploded from roughly $13 million in 2022 to 2023 to $2.85 billion from 2024 to 2025, averaging $240 million monthly with occasional spikes exceeding $600 million. This isn’t speculative trading volume. It’s genuine utility being monetized at scale.
Payments: Where Solana Becomes Infrastructure
Solana Pay has quietly become the blockchain equivalent of what Stripe did for internet payments. By 2025, SOL ranked as the seventh most used cryptocurrency for payments globally, according to CoinGate’s payment data covering May 2024 through October 2025.
Real businesses are accepting SOL for real goods and services. Web hosting giant Hostinger accounts for 30.4% of all SOL payment orders. VPN provider NordVPN and proxy service IPRoyal are processing millions in Solana …
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