Multicoin Co-founder Kyle Samani: SOL Market Cap Will Exceed ETH in This Cycle
Kyle Samani stated in a Cointelegraph program that more crypto companies will turn to Solana due to its usability and functionality, predicting that Solana's market cap will surpass Ethereum's in this cycle, diminishing Ethereum's advantage as the default smart contract network. He did not provide specific dates or target prices.
He mentioned that hardly anyone is truly using Ethereum today, with its lead primarily relying on stablecoins and stablecoins borrowed against ETH. He is pessimistic about ETH's value capture: it is a $300 billion to $400 billion asset, with questionable or possibly nonexistent capture ability, and no growth at all. He does not understand why investors hold at current valuations, believing there are more reasonably priced assets in the market.
At that time, SOL's market cap was about $58 billion, and ETH's was about $293 billion, meaning SOL would need to increase about fourfold to flip. He described Solana as the most feature-rich network, allowing businesses to consolidate operations onto a single chain to reduce complexity. Despite SOL's market cap being less than one-fifth of ETH's, its weekly and monthly transaction fees have already surpassed Ethereum's. DefiLlama shows that Solana's fees over the past 30 days were about $23 million, ranking fourth, while Ethereum's were about $12.6 million, ranking sixth.
Multicoin led the early round of Solana in 2018, and he has been bullish on the chain for a long time. This is his first high-profile public statement since stepping down as managing partner in February 2026. He predicts that the company's default chain, transaction fees, and token value capture will align.
In market mechanics, this is a narrative of positions. The buy side bets on the migration of Solana applications, leading transaction fees, and market cap flipping within the cycle; the sell side treats ETH as collateral and settlement layer funds. Capital is being repriced between the two smart contract assets. The beneficiaries are Solana ecosystem applications and SOL holders; the pressured side is the portfolio holding ETH at the old default network premium.
Source: Public Information
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Samani entered Ethereum in 2016, turned to Solana due to dissatisfaction with scalability routes, and then used the fund to make early chips into a long-term main line. The flipping prediction is not a neutral observation; it writes the already bet default chain into the cycle's conclusion. He stated that no one uses Ethereum, and the measure is whether businesses consolidate operations onto a high-functionality chain, rather than where stablecoin supply remains.
The capital path is to first invest in infrastructure, then force the narrative to align with transaction fees. Multicoin views Solana as an operating system that integrates payments, trading, and issuance, while ETH is written as collateral and a stablecoin landing pad. The 30-day transaction fees of $23 million versus $12.6 million are used to prove that usage has already shifted, even though market cap has not. The motivation is to let valuations catch up with fees, rather than letting fees accommodate old market values.
In a similar position, it is closer to the flip from feature phones to smartphones as the default, rather than two parallel settlement layers coexisting. The industry phase is shifting the default smart contract network from "first-mover assets" to "single chains that can consolidate operations." Those who allow companies to operate fewer chains will take the next round of application budgets first.
Structural changes belong to the transfer of pricing power. Token pricing power shifts from historical market value and collateral narratives to default enterprise deployment and transaction fees. The mechanism is: stablecoins freeze ETH in the collateral layer, while applications burn activity on faster chains; once activity and market cap are long-term separated, newcomers will use cycle flips to write the separation into repricing.
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- Once the default chain is replaceable, market cap will make up for transaction fees.
- A large collateral layer does not mean that someone is doing business on it.
- The network that first consolidates operations will take the next round of application budgets.