Galaxy Digital Dumps $100M Ethereum for Solana—Novogratz Bets on the ’Ethereum Killer’

On-chain data reveals Mike Novogratz’s crypto firm just executed a nine-figure ETH-to-SOL swap—because why hold the old guard when you can chase the shiny new thing? The move signals a major institutional pivot as Solana’s speed and lower fees continue eating Ethereum’s lunch. Just don’t ask what happens during the next network outage.

Standard Chartered estimated in its note that Base has cut $50 billion from its market cap, but also argued that tokenized real-world assets could help stabilize Ethereum.

Many blockchain metrics would support Standard Chartered’s thesis, as transactions on Solana have rocketed past Ethereum in the last three months.

A Dune dashboard shows that decentralized exchange (DEX) volume on Solana has moved past $500 billion in the last three months, while DEX volume on Ethereum is less than $400 billion. Active addresses on Solana are over 220 million while Ethereum and Ethereum Layer-2 addresses are just over 80 million.

One idea, first proposed by Tron’s Justin Sun, to reverse this "structural decline" of Ethereum has been a tax on Layer-2s.

"All collected taxes will be used to repurchase ETH and burn it in a fully decentralized manner," he wrote on X. This idea, however, hasn’t been formalized into an Ethereum Improvement Proposal (EIP) which would be the first step in it becoming reality.

Meanwhile, Flow data from the Ether ETFs shows that investors moved nearly $600 million out of these listed products over the last two months.