In the 17th year of the Crypto Era, where does Solana's path to survival lead?

Original | Odaily (@OdailyChina)

Author | Wenser (@wenser 2010 )

As the crypto industry enters its 17th year, competition among public chains has gradually shifted from the old battles over funding scale, TVL, developer count, and ecosystem projects to a multi-dimensional contest spanning protocol revenue, protocol profit, ecosystem scale, and emerging assets.

After passing through DeFi Summer, GameFi Summer, NFT Summer, Inscription Summer, and Meme Summer, the competitive landscape of public chains in 2026 has gradually crystallized into a "four strong, one weak, plus others"格局 — comprising the Ethereum mainnet ecosystem, the BSC ecosystem, the Ethereum L2 ecosystem represented by Base and Robinhood Chain, the Solana ecosystem, the Hyperliquid EVM ecosystem, and other networks.

DefiLlama data shows that among the top 10 public chains by revenue over the past 30 days, excluding Canton (whose revenue lacks statistical reference value due to incentives) and Tron (which consistently ranks high due to stablecoin demand), the rest are Robinhood Chain, Base, Ethereum, Solana, Polygon, BSC, Hyperliquid L1, and Arbitrum — largely consistent with our categorization above. Among these, Solana, which once rode the Meme wave to prominence, has fallen to 6th place in revenue rankings (5th when excluding Canton), with its 30-day revenue amounting to only about one-tenth that of Robinhood Chain.