It may be mean reversion time for Ethereum and Solana

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There’s been much made of Solana’s DeFi resurgence that has put it neck-and-neck with Ethereum in multiple key metrics. 

But by one count, Ethereum is now pulling meaningfully ahead of the next-biggest smart contract blockchain. 

Total economic value (TEV) is a Blockworks Research-created stat that measures a blockchain’s transaction fees and maximal extractible value (MEV) tips. This can be thought of like the income a blockchain receives, and it’s a helpful counterpoint to active addresses — a mostly-meaningless measure that’s been having too much time in the sun lately.

For most of the blockchains’ respective histories, Ethereum’s TEV has been several multiples of Solana’s. But earlier this year, as more Ethereum activity fled to layer-2s in search of cheaper fees and Solana saw a memecoin-inspired volume frenzy, Solana basically evened the score. 

Outside of a brief Ethereum income spike around the beginning of June that roughly coincided with ether ETFs being approved, Solana and Ethereum TEV have moved roughly in tandem for most of this year — until the past couple weeks, when Ethereum spiked to seven times Solana’s TEV. 

The gap has narrowed slightly in the past couple days, but it’s still the most meaningful TEV divergence we’ve seen in months. 

Amid the spike in Ethereum TEV, Ethereum’s average gas price climbed nearly 500% over the past 10 days above its prior 30-day moving average, according to Coinbase analysts. 

When I posed to X the question of why Ethereum is retaking the lead, I was quickly told that Ethereum’s base layer has seen a resurgence in memecoins, ever the driver of blockchain income. 

But digging a bit deeper, it’s not quite clear that this is the case. A couple weeks ago, Ethervista tried to manufacture the pump.fun zeitgeist on Ethereum, but a Dune analytics chart suggests it’s already joined SunPump in the graveyard of would-be competitors to the Solana memecoin launchpad. 

Uniswap is still the biggest fee-generating app for Ethereum. The decentralized exchange generated roughly $9 million in fees over the past week, which is around double that of the biggest Solana DEX in Raydium and triple that of pump.fun, according to DeFiLlama data. Among the top ten Uniswap tokens by volume over the past week, you’ll find just one memecoin: Doggo. If you look at the highest market cap memecoins, they’re still largely Solana upstarts, with the exception of Base-based Brett.

So there may be another explanation at play than that Ethereum is the new home for memes. 

Blockworks Research analyst Westie said the TEV divergence may be “reversion back to the mean,” a statistical observation that things straying far from their usual baseline tend to move closer to that baseline in the long run. Despite Solana’s recent success, ETH still overlooks a sprawling ecosystem with a much larger market cap than SOL. 

“This huge spike is likely because [Ethereum] mainnet has had extremely low fees for a while as people have [not] been doing much on mainnet since the spring,” Westie said.

So, Solana’s memes may be safe. But even still, here comes Ethereum.

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