Solana vs Ethereum Monthly Active Users 2026: Why Solana Is Winning the On-Chain War

Here’s a number that stopped me mid-scroll: Solana crossed 98 million monthly active users in 2026.

Ethereum, for comparison, is running somewhere around 700,000 daily active addresses according to Messari’s February 2026 data.

That gap is not a rounding error. That’s not even the same order of magnitude. So either Solana is doing something fundamentally different, or someone is measuring things in a way that flatters the headline. I wanted to know which — so I went through the data.

I don’t hold Solana or Ethereum as core positions right now. I run a YieldMax + BTC portfolio, and my active speculation budget is small. But I cover both chains, I’ve been watching this user activity divergence build for three years, and I think it matters for anyone trying to figure out where on-chain momentum is actually going. So let me walk you through what I found.

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The Metric That Actually Matters (And Why TVL Gets Too Much Credit)

If you’ve spent any time in crypto research, you’ve probably heard “total value locked” treated like the definitive scoreboard for blockchains. More TVL = more important chain. That’s been Ethereum’s biggest advantage for years.

But TVL measures capital parked in protocols, not people using a network. It’s a good proxy for institutional and DeFi depth. It’s a bad proxy for whether a network is growing its user base.

Monthly active users and daily active users measure something different: real humans (or at least real wallets) interacting with the chain on a regular basis. That’s transaction volume. That’s fee revenue. That’s the foundation of a network effect.

Why does this matter for investors? Because if you’re trying to identify which chain has forward momentum with retail users — which chain developers will build on next, which chain might see the next wave of dApps, meme coins, and on-chain activity — you want to know where the people are. And right now, Solana is eating Ethereum’s lunch on that metric.

That doesn’t mean Solana wins everything. I’ll get to the catch. But let’s look at the actual numbers first.

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Solana Monthly Active Users 2026: What Messari, CoinLedger, and Artemis Actually Show

I pulled from three sources for this: Messari’s February 2026 chain report, CoinLedger’s 2026 activity data, and Artemis/MEXC News for the MAU figure. Here’s what they show:

Solana

Ethereum

A few things worth noting:

The DAU gap is real but the denominator varies. Messari’s conservative 1.8M for Solana vs 700K for Ethereum is roughly a 2.5x difference. CoinLedger’s numbers (3.25M vs 410K) show nearly an 8x gap. The methodology matters — Solana’s low transaction costs mean wallets interact far more frequently, which inflates “active user” counts compared to Ethereum where a user might do two transactions a week because gas fees make frequent small interactions economically dumb.

Solana’s transaction count is not comparable to Ethereum’s. Thirty-six million transactions per day on Solana vs 1.1 million on Ethereum sounds like a 32x difference. But Solana’s architecture includes a lot of lightweight, near-zero-fee transactions that wouldn’t exist at all on Ethereum’s fee structure. More transactions ≠ more economic activity per transaction. This is a real nuance the headlines miss.

The MAU number (98M) includes indirect activity. Some of Solana’s MAU count flows through aggregators, wallet apps, and consumer-facing products that interact with the chain without users consciously “using Solana.” That’s not fake — it’s actually how mainstream adoption works. But it’s not apples-to-apples with how Ethereum counts its users.

None of this undermines Solana’s lead. It just means the real advantage is probably 3–5x, not 100x.

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Why Solana Got Here: The Fee Floor Changed Everything

I’ve been watching this play out since 2023, and the story isn’t complicated. Solana fixed its stability issues after the network outages of 2021–2022, kept fees near zero, and offered transaction speeds that made Ethereum feel like dial-up.

When you charge $0.0025 per transaction versus Ethereum’s variable gas fees that can hit $5–50 during congestion, you change who can use the network and what they can do with it.

Meme coins drove a big chunk of the user growth. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. Pump.fun launched on Solana and generated enormous transaction volume from retail speculation on meme tokens. That’s not institutional quality — it’s retail gambling, basically. But it also means millions of people learned how to use a crypto wallet, connect to a DEX, and execute on-chain transactions for the first time. That’s real onboarding.

Gaming and consumer apps reinforced it. Mobile-first Solana apps, NFT activity on compressed NFT formats, and DeFi protocols like Jupiter and Raydium all benefited from a fee environment where small transactions make economic sense. Try running a mobile game on Ethereum mainnet. Every in-game action costs real money. On Solana, it costs a rounding error.

From 400K DAU in early 2023 to 1.8M+ by mid-2026 — that’s a 350% increase in active wallets over roughly three years. Ethereum’s growth in the same period was modest by comparison. That’s not a narrative. That’s Bitget Academy’s measurement of on-chain wallet data.

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The Catch: Activity Doesn’t Automatically Equal Investment Value

Here’s where I pump the brakes, because I’ve seen this argument used to turn a data point into a maximalist conclusion, and that’s not how I invest.

Solana winning the transaction volume and user count war does not automatically mean SOL is a better investment than ETH. Here’s why:

Ethereum still dominates where institutional capital lives. Total value locked in Ethereum-based DeFi protocols still dwarfs Solana, even accounting for Solana’s growth. When a hedge fund or a treasury desk wants on-chain yield exposure, they’re almost always going to Ethereum-based protocols first. That’s not about sentiment — it’s about the depth of the protocol ecosystem, the security track record, and the liquidity.

Stablecoins still mostly run on Ethereum. USDC and USDT — the rails of the DeFi economy — have their deepest pools on Ethereum. That means the most economically significant transactions still happen there, even if there are fewer of them.

Developer mindshare is more balanced than the user numbers suggest. Ethereum has a decade of developer tooling, audited protocols, and institutional-grade security track record. Solana has made serious strides here (particularly with tooling improvements in 2024–2025), but the ecosystem is younger. New developers learning crypto still reach for Ethereum or EVM-compatible chains first, largely because the documentation, tooling, and career market are more mature there.

And Solana has been here before. I remember the FTX collapse wrecking Solana’s price and ecosystem. The outages in 2021 and early 2022. Solana has been counted out multiple times. It bounced back — seriously bounced back — but it has more existential risk than Ethereum in my view. Smaller validator set, more centralization concerns, a different security model. Not disqualifying. Just different risk.

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What This Means for Your Portfolio

I’ll be direct: I think the Solana vs Ethereum question is genuinely interesting right now, and the user activity data is the strongest evidence I’ve seen in Solana’s favor in years.

But I’m not making a binary choice. I’d frame it this way:

If you’re a growth-oriented investor who believes network effects compound and retail adoption creates durable value, Solana’s user trajectory is the most bullish data point in the L1 space. You’re making a bet that 98 million users becomes 150 million, that Solana’s fee environment continues to attract consumer apps, and that the eventual economic value of those users gets priced into SOL at some point.

If you’re a more conservative crypto investor (like me, most of the time), Ethereum’s institutional dominance and protocol security make it the lower-volatility option — which is a relative term in crypto, I acknowledge. ETH is not safe. But it’s safer than SOL in terms of ecosystem stability and institutional adoption moat.

The honest answer for most retail investors is: pick the one your thesis supports and size it appropriately. If you think retail transaction volume and consumer app growth is the next driver of crypto value, Solana is your chain. If you think institutional DeFi and stablecoin dominance is where value accrues, Ethereum still has a strong case.

Neither answer requires you to be a maximalist.

If you want to start buying either, I use Coinbase for spot purchases — they support both SOL and ETH with solid liquidity. Kraken is my other go-to, especially if you’re interested in staking ETH — their staking rates and on-chain integration are solid.

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How We Got Here: A Quick History of the Rivalry

In 2021, Ethereum was the unquestioned king of smart contract chains. Solana launched as a high-throughput alternative, got significant hype, briefly hit $260 in November 2021, and then got absolutely wrecked in the 2022 bear market — partly from its own network outages, partly from its deep ties to FTX. When FTX collapsed in November 2022, Solana’s ecosystem went with it. Alameda was a massive Solana ecosystem backer, SOL’s price dropped from $30 to under $10 in a week, and a lot of serious people wrote the chain off entirely.

I wasn’t one of them. I watched what the developers did after the collapse. They fixed the stability issues. They rebuilt the protocol reputation. And then in 2023, when meme coin mania kicked off and Pump.fun launched, suddenly Solana had a killer use case that Ethereum couldn’t touch on price: frictionless retail speculation with cent-level fees.

That’s the blunt truth of where a lot of the user growth came from. Meme coins. Not what anyone building serious DeFi infrastructure wants to hear. But it got millions of new wallets activated, people learning the mechanics of DEX trading, and a whole generation of retail crypto users whose first on-chain experience was on Solana rather than Ethereum.

By late 2024 and into 2025, more serious applications followed. Not because of meme coin momentum — those cycles fade — but because developers noticed the user base and the technical improvements Solana’s team had shipped. Faster finality, lower fees, better developer tooling. That combination attracted real builders after the retail crowd showed up.

Ethereum, meanwhile, has been executing a different playbook entirely: scaling through its L2 ecosystem (Base, Arbitrum, Optimism) rather than optimizing mainnet throughput. It’s a defensible strategy that keeps Ethereum’s security model intact while allowing faster and cheaper activity on the edges. But it fragments the user count across chains, which is part of why Solana’s MAU headline looks so dominant.

Both strategies are rational for different goals. Understanding the history explains why the current numbers look the way they do.

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What I’ll Actually Be Watching

I’m not making a big position change based on this data. But I am paying attention to a few things going forward:

Solana ETF approval. The SEC just provided clearer commodity vs security guidance with the joint CFTC ruling in March 2026. That opens a potential path for a Solana spot ETF in 2026–2027. If that happens, the institutional wall that’s currently keeping big money in Ethereum opens up to Solana. That would be a significant re-rating event.

Developer ecosystem growth. If Solana continues attracting serious developers — not just meme coin launchers — that changes the long-term investment case. I’ll be watching GitHub activity, protocol launches, and whether serious DeFi projects are choosing Solana over Ethereum for new builds.

Transaction quality vs quantity. Right now, a lot of Solana’s transaction volume is low-value spam and meme token trading. If higher-value economic activity (larger DeFi positions, stablecoin flows, institutional yield protocols) starts migrating to Solana, that changes the value proposition substantially.

Ethereum’s L2 response. Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism have been pulling Ethereum activity off mainnet and onto faster, cheaper layers. If Ethereum L2s start competing directly with Solana’s UX for retail users, some of Solana’s advantage narrows. The MAU gap might shrink even if Ethereum’s core protocol keeps its institutional moat.

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FAQ

Is Solana really bigger than Ethereum in 2026?

By user count and daily transaction volume, yes. Solana’s 98 million monthly active users and 36 million daily transactions significantly outpace Ethereum’s ~700,000 daily active addresses and 1.1 million daily transactions. By total value locked and institutional capital, Ethereum still leads.

What caused Solana’s massive user growth?

Primarily three things: near-zero transaction fees, fast block times, and a wave of retail-oriented applications — particularly meme coin trading platforms like Pump.fun and consumer DeFi apps like Jupiter. These created on-chain activity at a volume that would be economically unviable on Ethereum mainnet.

Does Solana’s user lead mean SOL will outperform ETH?

Not automatically. Price and user count don’t always move together in crypto — or in any market. Ethereum’s institutional ecosystem, developer depth, and stablecoin dominance create a different kind of value that doesn’t show up in MAU numbers. The honest answer is that both have compelling cases depending on your time horizon and thesis.

Can I stake SOL or ETH on Coinbase or Kraken?

Yes. Coinbase supports both SOL and ETH staking through their Earn product. Kraken supports ETH staking with a solid yield offering. Rates vary and both platforms take a cut, so compare before you commit funds. For ETH specifically, I’ve found Kraken’s staking integration to be cleaner.

Should a beginner buy Solana or Ethereum?

I’d ask a different question: do you understand what you’re buying? If you can explain the difference between a high-throughput consumer chain and a protocol-depth institutional chain, you’re ready to make a call. If not, start with BTC or ETH as your first crypto position, understand how they work, and add SOL exposure when you have a clear thesis for why you’re doing it.

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Bottom Line

Solana’s 98 million monthly active users in 2026 is not a marketing claim — it’s Artemis data, backed up by Messari’s daily active address counts that show a 2.5x–8x advantage over Ethereum depending on methodology.

The user activity story favors Solana. The institutional capital and ecosystem depth story still favors Ethereum. That’s the actual state of the competition.

I’ve been in crypto since 2014. I’ve watched chains come and go. Solana has earned its place in the conversation at this point — not because of hype, but because of what the on-chain data actually shows. That matters. How much it matters for your portfolio depends on your specific thesis.

For me, I’m watching, not loading up. But I’m not ignoring those numbers either.

Coinbase affiliate disclosure: Links in this article to Coinbase and Kraken are affiliate links. I may earn a commission at no cost to you. I only recommend exchanges I’ve personally used.