Solana generates a lot more fees with a much smaller market cap than Ethereum, Samani argued.
Mar 18, 2025, 4:44 p.m. UTC
Solana doesn’t yet have an exchange-traded fund, but one of the asset’s biggest backers is betting the Wall Street-friendly vehicle could come in 2025 — and believes it’s well-positioned to trounce Ethereum’s various similar products.
Multicoin Capital’s Kyle Samani — a major investor in SOL and countless subordinate protocols — has been publicly pressing the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to look favorably upon a SOL ETF. His bullish pronouncements therefore might come as little surprise.
But onstage Tuesday at Blockworks’ Digital Asset Summit in New York City, Samani explained his view why Solana is better placed to appeal to traditional investors than Ethereum did. It’s all about the money: the fees being generated on-chain, compared to the value of the asset’s totality.
“A lot of the reason why the ETH ETF didn’t have a super strong reception was a lot of investors looked at ETH and said ‘show me the fees,’ Samani said.
By his telling, they didn’t find much proof to justify investing at its high prices.
Stock traders often look at a company’s price to earnings ratio in deciding whether it’s over or undervalued; in other words, when to invest. Crypto doesn’t have such a clean metric, but blockchains still have revenue and tokens that can be mushed together for similar effect.
Samani believes Solana’s theoretical P/E ratio is much healthier from an investing standpoint than Ethereum’s. His onstage math placed Solana as trading at 30 to 50 times its P/E whereas Ethereum is trading closer to 1,000 times.
Solana’s P/E ratio is “much more in line with high-growth tech stocks,” Samani said.
If the logic plays out then traditional investors might be expected to believe Solana has more upside than Ethereum, and invest accordingly.
Danny Nelson
Danny is CoinDesk’s managing editor for Data & Tokens. He formerly ran investigations for the Tufts Daily. At CoinDesk, his beats include (but are not limited to): federal policy, regulation, securities law, exchanges, the Solana ecosystem, smart money doing dumb things, dumb money doing smart things and tungsten cubes. He owns BTC, ETH and SOL tokens, as well as the LinksDAO NFT.
