Bitcoin dominance is falling and altcoin season is calling. Who’s calling? And this has everyone scrolling through the front page of sites like Coin Market Cap wondering which altcoins have the most potential in the coming months. The two that stand out the most are Ethereum and Solana. ETH and Soul have both been beaten down in recent months, but are recovering quickly and could see the biggest gains among large cap altcoins. And that’s why today we’re going to compare Ethereum and Salana to figure out whether ETH or Soul will be the top altcoin heading into what could be an epic altcoin season. My name is Nick and believe me folks, this is a video you do not want to miss. I’ll start by saying that nothing in this video is financial advice. It’s educational content intended to inform you about Ethereum and Salana. Also, do note that many members of the Coin Bureau team hold both Soul and ETH in their personal portfolios and we’ll be objective as always in our analysis. If you want to know which other altcoins we’re betting on in the coming months, then become a member of the Coin Bureau Club. Members get access to our full portfolios and watch lists, weekly reviews of small cap altcoins that they vote on, daily insights about the next big narrative, and real time market alpha in the members Discord. You can find the link to the Coin Bureau Club down in the description. With that said, let’s start with what most of you came here for, and that’s an analysis of ETH and Soul’s recent price action. As you can see, ETH has basically been chopping in the same range for over 2 years with a gut-wrenching crash in April that took it to lows not seen since 2022. Thankfully, ETH has recovered and is in the process of reclaiming the Ballinger band moving average on the monthly. Now, for context, the Ballinger band moving average, aka BBMA, on the monthly is a good way to get a sense of whether a crypto is in a bull market or a bare market. If it’s below this level, then it’s in a bare market. If it’s above this level, then it’s a bull market. Logically then, ETH getting back above this level suggests that it’s back in bull market territory and higher highs could be on the menu in the coming months. Notably, throwing on the relative strength index or RSI suggests that ETH may not face much resistance on the way up. One of the side effects of ETH chopping and grinding for so long is that it has reset the RSI. Now, the last time ETH was around this price, the RSI was over 70. Now, it’s only around 50. In practical terms, this means that ETH isn’t anywhere near close to being overbought and therefore can rally much longer. Additional evidence that ETH is about to see a massive meltup can be found on the infamous ETH BTC chart which has been going down for almost three and a half years prior to the recent reversal. In this case, the weekly chart gives us a better vantage point. ETH BTC is finally above the BBMA and appears to be squeezing to the upside. It is a similar story for Soul. Whereas ETH has been chopping in a range for 2 years, Soul has been trading mostly sideways for around 18 months, which is crazy to think about. In contrast to ETH though, Soul has managed to hold on to the monthly BBMA, suggesting the bull trend is much stronger with Soul than it is with ETH. Notably, if we look at the previous cycle, we can see that soul chopped sideways around the monthly BBMA before moving higher. And it’s possible that we seeing almost exactly the same thing happen now. And if that is the case, then it likewise suggests that Soul will get a second big leg higher in the coming months. Like ETH, the Soul BTC price is where things get a bit more interesting. Many have argued that Soul BTC’s current chart looks identical to ETH BTC’s in the previous cycle, meaning that Soul is unlikely to outperform BTC from here. Besides the fact that ETH BTC appears to be painting a double bottom pattern on the weekly, there are big differences between ETH in the past cycle and soul in the current cycle that the charts don’t tell us. You see, the reason why ETH stopped gaining against BTC in the previous cycle was primarily because it lost a lot of market share to cheaper and faster blockchains, including Salana. And this time around, however, Solana is still one of the fastest and cheapest chains out there. This means it’s unlikely to face the same headwinds as Ethereum did in the previous cycle. And that therefore means Soul versus BTC could still have one leg higher to go. And this of course begs the question of which of these two cryptos have the most potential and how high Soul and ETH could go. To find the answer, we have to go beyond the price charts because the dynamics driving these two cryptos are very different to what we see with other altcoins. Both have ETFs, both have treasury companies, and both are being adopted by institutions. If you stick around, you’ll not only know how high, but why. Before we get onto that though, take a second to like this video if you’re enjoying it so far. And don’t forget to subscribe and ping the notification bell as well so YouTube can give you a bell as well when we release another upload. Back to the vid. Now figuring out how high Soul and ETH could go fundamentally boils down to understanding what the demand drivers are for their respective coins will be at the highest level. These demand drivers can be broken down into two categories. Institutional demand and retail demand. Starting with institutional demand. The first metric to watch is ETF inflows. According to Farside investors, the spot Ethereum ETFs have experienced around 5.5 billion worth of inflows since their launch in July 2024. And FYI, most of these inflows have occurred over the last few months. As for Salana, data from Farside investors suggests that the recently launched State Spot Salana ETF has seen less than $100 million worth of net inflows at the time of shooting. And that’s not much, but it’s worth repeating that the staked spot Salana ETF literally launched a couple of weeks ago. It’s literally brand new. Now, for reference, these spot ETFs are important for two reasons. The first is that they make it easy for holders of spot bitcoin ETFs to rotate into ETH and soul via their respective ETFs. The second reason ties into the first, and that’s that these ETFs are ultimately a pathway for institutional liquidity to flow into ETH and Soul. As we’ve seen with the spot Ethereum ETFs, though, pathways don’t guarantee inflows. What’s required for inflows is a catalyst that attracts the attention and investment of investors. And this is where things get truly fascinating. As far as we can tell, Ethereum and Salana both have a similar list of potential catalysts. And that’s because they arguably are the two top smart contract cryptocurrencies. And this makes them ideal for things like real world asset tokenization and stable coin payments. The catch is that Ethereum and Salana have their own strengths and weaknesses, which makes them better or worse for each use case. From our perspective, the catalyst that’s likely to bring the most attention to Ethereum is tokenized RWAS. And that’s because Ethereum is technically the most secure smart contract crypto in existence. And the result of that is that Ethereum hosts most of the RWA TVL per RWAXYZ. On the flip side, the catalyst that’s likely to bring the most attention to Salana is stable coin payments. And this is because Salana has not so subtly been positioning itself for stable coin payments for a long time. In case you missed the news, PayPal partnered with Salana for PYUSD stable coin payments last year and is looking to increase the usage of PYUSD later this year. PayPal is of course the world’s largest payment processor. Now, in theory, you’d think that institutional investors would stick to ETH because it’s simply the most battle tested of them all. In practice, however, it’s a bit more complicated. For starters, being the next financial rail appears to be the better value proposition than having the next stock exchange. Case in point, the combined market cap of stock exchange companies is around $250 billion compared to $1.5 trillion for payment processes. There’s also the question of yield. Ethereum staking rewards are less than 3% whereas Salana staking rewards are closer to 7.5% and more than double. Now more importantly, Salana staking rewards are significantly above US bond yields and this could make soul more appealing than ETH to many institutions. The caveat is that most of Salana’s staking and rewards are coming from inflation which is likewise more than double that of Ethereum. But this is where the Ethereum and Salana treasury companies come in. If you think about it, these treasury companies are essentially offsetting the inflation of both cryptos and also taking some of the supply off the market. Bitcoin treasury companies do the same with BTC. Funnily enough, it seems that Ethereum and Salana treasury companies have purchased similar amounts of ETH and sold, at least based on the current available data. Ethereum treasury companies have purchased around $1 billion in ETH with Shar link being the largest buyer. Similarly, Solana treasury companies have purchased around 1 billion soul with Soul Strategies being the largest buyer. Believe it or not, but ETH and Soul have similar inflation rates in US dollar terms. ETH’s monthly supply increase is around 100,000, which works out to about $300 million at ETH’s current price of around $3,000. Similarly, Soul’s monthly supply increase is around 2 million, which works out to about $300 million at Soul’s current price of around $150. So, both inflation rates are being offset by Treasury companies. It actually makes you wonder if this is the true purpose of these Treasury companies, but uh let’s not go down that rabbit hole. Now, this ties into the retail demand for Soul and ETH, and this is where things get even more intriguing. At first glance, you’d think that Ethereum’s layer 2 decrease fundamental retail demand for ETH because they have exponentially lower fees than the base chain. But upon closer inspection, you quickly realize that ETH’s primary demand driver isn’t the fees, but all the stuff you can do with ETH onchain. News flash. But this is the reason why Soul, AAX, Matic, and all the other so-called Ethereum killers performed so well in the previous cycle. It wasn’t because their fees were high. It’s because their fees were low. And this resulted in lots of onchain activity, namely trading and borrowing. In case you forgot from earlier, it’s the speed and cost of Ethereum alternatives that caused ETH to underperform BTC in the last cycle. Given this fact, it’s less accurate to say that layer 2s are taking market share away from Ethereum and more accurate to say that they’re taking market share away from EVMbased Ethereum killers. And this is bullish for ETH because it means that instead of someone buying AVAC to use on Avalanche, they will buy ETH to use in the layer 2 like base primarily to buy altcoins and use ETH as collateral in DeFi to buy more altcoins. In other words, Ethereum layer 2s means more EVM chains using ETH as their primary asset and that means more demand for ETH regardless of what happens with fees on the main chain. There is just one small problem though and that’s fragmentation. Almost every layer 2 has its own native decks, its own native lending protocol, and its own flavor of speculative alts. Meanwhile, most liquidity is still on the layer 1. This is in stark contrast to Salana where almost all of the liquidity, all the protocols and all the tokens can be found on one chain. From an enduser perspective, this means that you only need to go to one place instead of a dozen. And that makes life so much easier. Don’t get me wrong, the fragmentation issue on Ethereum will improve as chain abstraction improves, but this is far from being finalized to say the least. Now, the only reason why I mention all of this is because as far as retail investors are concerned, they will use whichever chain is the cheapest, the fastest, the most userfriendly, and has the most cryptos they want to buy. And Salana has the best of all four worlds, whereas Ethereum is lacking on the latter two. And this is precisely why the memecoin craze materialized on Salana and had a hard time materializing on other chains. Salana’s user-friendly front end such as the Phantom wallet plus its low cost and speed made it the most ideal place for retail investors to speculate. In our view, this hasn’t really changed but has changed in the types of cryptos that could rally. And this is where more nuance is required. Suppose ETH starts rallying because of say some Tradfire institution announcing that it’s launching some next generation tokenized RWA infrastructure on Ethereum. Obviously, this would cause ETH’s price to rise, especially if we see large institutional inflows via Ethereum’s spot ETFs in response to this catalyst. What’s not so obvious, though, is that this will cause many altcoins on Ethereum and its layer 2 to also rally. And that’s because these altcoins trade primarily against ETH. So when ETH’s price rises in fiat terms, so too will most of these altcoins. Of course, when retail investors see these altcoins rally, they will want to buy them, too. Believe it or not, but the user experience on Ethereum has improved significantly in recent months as well. Uh the integration of Ethereum and some of its layer 2s with wallets like Phantom has also made its ecosystem more accessible. And this means that it will be much easier for retail investors to access altcoins on Ethereum than it was in the past. And because both ETH and so many blue chip Ethereum altcoins are so beaten down, this could result in bigger gains compared to Soul and most blue chip Salana altcoins bringing in even more retail investors. But I’ll reiterate that this is all hypothetical. But it’s easy to see how this could play out. Again, the key takeaway is that retail will flock to whichever chain is the cheapest, fastest, most userfriendly, and has the most of the altcoins they want to buy. We honestly don’t know whether this will be Ethereum or Solana. But we do know that the playing field is a lot more level than when Solana dominated in previous rallies. But again, Soul could undergo the exact same dynamics I just mentioned. We could see PayPal announcing some new incentive program for PYUSD that makes institutional investors see Salana as the next payment rail. And this could result in large inflows into the spot Salana ETFs causing Soul’s price to rise. And this will of course cause altcoins in Salana to pump causing retail investors to ape in. And because these altcoins are also pretty beaten down, they too could rally a lot bringing in even more retail. And this of course brings me to the two big questions. Which of these two cryptos has the most potential and how high they could go? Considering everything we covered, the answer to the former seems to be that both ETH and Soul have similar potential at this stage in the cycle. Neither has a clear advantage over the other. They look similar in the charts. They’re both accessible to institutions. They’re both being bought by the treasury companies. They both have big catalysts that could result in large institutional inflows. And ETH and Soul both are the top cryptos that retail investors will use to buy altcoin and use in DeFi as collateral. If you want this summed up in a single chart, then look no further than the sole ETH pair. From up close, it looks like ETH has been outperforming Soul and will continue to outperform it. When you zoom out, though, it’s clear that Soul has been the one outperforming ETH until recently. And we’re starting to just see a reversion to the mean. Notably, it looks like the sole ETH pair won’t fall much further from here. And this relates to how high ETH and Soul could go. In ETH’s case, everyone is eyeing 10K as the target, including us. In our case, that’s because we believe ETH is following BTC one cycle behind. A Bitcoin hit a market cap of around 1.3 trillion in 2021. If ETH follows suit, a 1.3 trillion market cap for ETH would translate to an ETH price of around 10K. There’s just one small problem, though. Everyone expects a 10K ETH. What this means is that we’re likely to see one of two scenarios play out. Either traders start taking profits early, causing ETH to top somewhere around 8 to 9K, or we see Wales purposely pushing ETH’s price above 10K, causing everyone who took profits to FOMO back in at around 11 to 12K. And when you consider that Ethereum still faces a lot of competition, it makes the former more likely than the latter. So 8 to 9K ETH could be the top this cycle. In Soul’s case, everyone is eyeing $1,000 as the next target, including us. In our case, that’s because we believe Soul is following ETH one cycle behind. Ethereum hit a market cap of around $550 billion in 2021. If Salana follows suit, a $550 billion market cap for Salana would translate to a soul price of around 1K. As you might have guessed, there’s just one small problem, and that’s that everyone expects Soul to hit 1K. What this means is that we’re once again likely to see one of two scenarios. Either traders start taking profits early, causing Soul to top somewhere around $600 or $700, or we see Wales purposely pushing Soul’s price above 1K, causing everyone who took profits early to FOMO back in at around $1,200 to $1,300. And in case you’re wondering, the reason why these ranges are different from ETH is based on our technical analysis from earlier. Now, believe it or not, but we actually think there’s a chance that Soul could surprise to the upside. Aside from the fact that many members of the Trump administration have ties to Salana, such as the cryptozar David Saxs himself, the demand drivers that could propel Soul higher seem to be stronger on the retail side and on the institutional side, specifically Salana as the next payment rail and demand for Soul to buy meme coins. Even so, it’s way too soon to declare for sure that Soul will surprise to the upside, especially since it’s facing fierce competition from the likes of Hyperlid. And that’s why we’ll play it safe and say that Soul will stop short of the 1K target everyone is watching because everyone will take profits early. What this means is that both ETH and Soul are likely to see 3 to 4x returns from their current levels, the exact same potential. And given everything that Soul and especially ETH holders have been through over the last year or so, I reckon most of them would be pretty happy with that. Now, if you agree or disagree, then let us know down in the comments. And after you’re done, be sure to check out our Ethereum versus Salana video from last year. If you want an even higher level analysis, that’s right over here. And of course, if you’re not subscribed to the channel yet, you can do that right over here. This is me, Nex, signing off. Thank you guys very much for watching and I will see you again soon.
