Although Solana is technically superior in speed and cost per transaction, Ethereum remains the market leader due to factors that go beyond raw performance.
Think of Ethereum as the New York Stock Exchange, it may be slower and more expensive, but it is where the largest volume of money and the most reliable companies are. Solana, on the other hand, would be a new ultra-fast tech exchange, attracting retail and rapid innovation.
To be ultra-fast like Solana, it is necessary for the network's validators to have very expensive hardware, which limits who can help run the network.
Ethereum has hundreds of thousands of validators spread around the world. It is considered the most difficult smart contract network to attack or censor.
Solana is more centralized due to technical requirements. Large investors and institutions prefer Ethereum to hold billions of dollars because they trust the network's long-term resilience more.
The TVL on Ethereum is much larger. The biggest whales and the largest financial protocols (Aave, Uniswap, MakerDAO) were born and remain on Ethereum.
If you want to take a loan of $100 million, you do it on Ethereum, as there is enough liquidity for that without destabilizing the market.
Ethereum solved its problem of being "slow and expensive" by creating Layer 2s, like Base, Arbitrum, and Optimism.
Today, you can have the security of Ethereum with the speed of Solana using an L2. This removed the main argument that made people abandon Ethereum.
Ethereum was the first. This created a huge advantage.
Most crypto developers know how to program in Solidity (used on ETH). Solana uses Rust, which is more powerful, but has a steeper learning curve.
EVM is the "Windows" of blockchains. Almost all other networks try to be compatible with Ethereum to attract its users and apps.
Solana wins in user experience, but Ethereum wins in trust and infrastructure. In the financial market, trust often outweighs speed.
