The current cryptocurrency market presents a distinct differentiation pattern: Bitcoin continues to play the role of digital gold, attracting ETF funds, listed companies represented by MicroStrategy, and even some national governments continue to purchase it as a strategic reserve asset; although Ethereum has rich and complete infrastructure, the overall ecology appears deserted; while SOL continues to detonate the market with various hot concepts, presenting a hot scene; other altcoins rise and fall passively with market fluctuations.
StarEx exchange analysts believe that in this round of market cycles, Ethereum, once the "king of ecology", has almost been completely overshadowed by SOL. In the financial market, whether it is stocks, futures, foreign exchange or cryptocurrencies, the most important thing is always the "money-making effect". Ordinary users do not care about technical details and project principles. The only thing they care about is whether they can make money through investment. In this regard, Ethereum is currently at a disadvantage.
Ethereum’s Cold Current State
In recent years, the Ethereum Foundation and Vitalik Buterin have focused more on technological innovation and the dissemination of ideas. Driven by them, the ecological projects around Ethereum seem to be prosperous: the on-chain data indicators are impressive, and projects with high market capitalization continue to emerge, and are endorsed through the support of the foundation and the financing of institutions. However, these projects rely more on airdrops to attract users, and their real ecological application development cannot keep up. After issuing coins, many teams sell off a large number of them, forming a continuous "selling coin" behavior, which weakens the wealth effect of users.
Although the ICO boom in 2017 was also full of a large number of air projects, these projects drove the prosperity of the Ethereum ecosystem through high multiples of hype. At that time, these air coins generally had a low market value, and they often achieved dozens or even hundreds of times of growth after listing. Today's SOL ecosystem has a similar hype model, and now the projects on SOL are more interesting, more attractive, and can quickly gather market hotspots.
SOL's hot hype and ecological prosperity
In this cycle, SOL has attracted a large number of users and funds with its strong "money-making effect". From meme coins to AI agents, various hot spots on SOL have emerged one after another, quickly igniting market enthusiasm. For example, the hype around meme coins in the SOL ecosystem gave birth to the PUMP platform. This platform allows users to complete the issuance by simply entering the name, website, link and other basic information of the meme coin and paying a very low gas fee. The simple and easy-to-use tools have driven the explosive growth of meme coins, which in turn has led to a significant increase in the transaction volume of DeFi platforms such as Ray and Jupiter, and the transaction volume has even exceeded Ethereum's Uniswap.
Most of the recent popular AI agent projects were also born in the SOL ecosystem. For example, tokens such as AI16z and Swarms have increased by dozens of times in just a few days. The SOL ecosystem provides users with a wealth of tools that allow them to quickly create their own AI agents without having to deeply understand the principles of AI technology. This convenience further enhances the attractiveness of the SOL ecosystem and continues to drive the influx of funds and users.
StarEx exchange analysts believe that both meme coins and AI agents are essentially concept-driven hype projects. Taking AI agents as an example, their actual function may just be to call the API interface of Web2 and simply package it with a token concept. However, these technical details are not important for the market. The key is that SOL has created a strong wealth effect through hot spots and attracted an influx of speculative funds.
In contrast, Ethereum has gradually lost its appeal to users due to its high infrastructure costs and lack of a clear wealth effect. The Ethereum team has invested a lot of energy in improving its infrastructure, but has ignored the need to combine market hotspots and user needs in building an ecosystem. Users will not actively flock to Ethereum because of its improved infrastructure, but will instead be deterred by the lack of a wealth effect.
StarEx exchange analysts believe that the success of SOL lies in the establishment of a circular mechanism: hot hype breeds new tools, which in turn promote the development of infrastructure applications, and the improvement of infrastructure can create more hot concepts. In contrast, although Ethereum has a large number of mature infrastructures, it lacks a hot-spot-driven dynamic mechanism, resulting in insufficient market vitality and low user participation.
StarEx exchange analysts believe that whether it is meme coins or AI agents, their value may be controversial, but they have successfully created market hot spots and brought rich returns. What the secondary market needs is not complex technical solutions, but hype concepts that can continue to attract users. From this point of view, SOL, with its hot-spot drive and convenient user tools, is likely to continue to be the first choice of users for a long time in the future, and this hype may continue for a long time.
