Raoul Pal, the founder of Real Vision, says the Solana-versus-Ethereum debate should be measured in capital rather than raw user counts. Speaking in a Cointelegraph Trade Secrets interview, Pal was asked whether Solana could overtake Ethereum by market capitalization — a metric calculated by multiplying a token's price by its circulating supply. He acknowledged the possibility but questioned whether the network's growing activity was enough on its own, pointing instead to the amount of money held on each chain relative to its active users.

What Pal means by value per user

“The economic density of a user on Ethereum is about two hundred thousand dollars,” Pal said in the interview. “That’s TVL per active user. On Solana, it’s about 2,500.”

Total value locked, or TVL, measures the assets deposited in decentralized-finance (DeFi) protocols. Dividing that total by a count of active users produces the economic-density figure Pal relies on. The resulting $200,000, however, does not describe what a typical Ethereum user owns or has deposited.

His framing gives greater weight to substantial lending balances, collateral and other financial assets than to frequent, smaller transactions. That distinction underpins his separation of Ethereum's financial depth from Solana's activity, which he described as primarily speculative while acknowledging its place in the market.

The financial balances behind his argument

DefiLlama's October 3 figures lend support to Ethereum's greater financial scale. The platform's Ethereum dashboard reported considerably more DeFi deposits and stablecoins — tokens designed to hold a steady value against a reference currency, typically the U.S. dollar — than its Solana dashboard, although both networks hold billions of dollars in each category. The two measures overlap, because stablecoins can themselves be deposited in DeFi protocols, so they should not be added together.

Ethereum leads in both, yet Solana's balances complicate any purely speculative description of the network. Stablecoin supply alone cannot show how much is actually used for payments, which makes settlement programs another lens on its financial uses. Visa's April update listed both Ethereum and Solana among the blockchains supported by its stablecoin settlement pilot. The company does not disclose how much activity runs on either chain, but the program represents a concrete financial use case beyond speculative trading.

Payments, borrowing and cash management give digital dollars purposes beyond buying crypto, as Coindoo's analysis of how stablecoins bring financial activity on-chain explains. For the comparison with Ethereum, the useful question is whether Solana can build sustained usage in these markets alongside its trading activity.

Why capital per user needs context

Those balances help assess Pal's argument, but they do not verify his specific per-user estimates. He did not provide the dataset or the measurement window behind the figures in this exchange, so the calculation cannot be reproduced from the interview alone.

A hypothetical example shows why the denominator matters. A network with $1 billion deposited in DeFi and 10,000 active addresses would have $100,000 in TVL per active address. If the address count rose to 100,000 while deposits stayed unchanged, the ratio would fall to $10,000 — a 90% decline, even though the network holds the same capital and now has ten times as many active addresses. Conversely, a high ratio can simply reflect substantial deposits spread across relatively few active addresses. The direction of the ratio therefore has to be read alongside changes in both capital and activity.

Even that example counts addresses rather than people. One person can operate several addresses, while a single service can represent many customers. Coin Metrics' methodology illustrates the distinction: it counts unique addresses participating in specified ledger changes during a defined period.

The capital side can move without new deposits. If tokens already locked in DeFi appreciate in price, their dollar value rises. DefiLlama separates asset inflows from price effects, allowing readers to distinguish fresh deposits from gains driven by the market.

Network boundaries matter as well. Pal includes Ethereum's layer-two ecosystem — networks that process transactions on separate ledgers before settling them back to Ethereum's mainnet — in his broader infrastructure argument, whereas DefiLlama's chain table reports mainnet balances. Combining capital across Ethereum and its layer twos with a mainnet-only user count would produce a different measure than one applying the same boundaries to both sides of the fraction.

How network activity reaches ETH and SOL

For investors, the remaining question is how any of this activity reaches the token they hold. Pal emphasized adoption when discussing low-cost transactions, saying: “These are not businesses, these are infrastructure layers.” Affordable transactions can help applications attract users, but a network's usefulness still has to be connected to its token economics.

On Ethereum, transaction fees are paid in ETH. The protocol burns the base fee, removing that ETH from circulation, while the priority fee goes to the validator. Ethereum's fee documentation explains how those charges respond to transaction demand.

Solana also charges fees in its native token. Under its fee rules, half of the base fee is burned and half goes to the validator, while priority fees go entirely to the validator. These arrangements tie usage to SOL payments and to changes in supply, although they do not establish a proportional relationship between transaction growth and price.

Neither design ETH or SOL holders a claim on every application's income. A successful business can build on a blockchain without sharing its profits with the token's owners — a distinction covered in Coindoo's explanation of what SOL is used for.

That leaves the same questions for both networks: are they attracting recurring financial activity, retaining capital and creating demand for their native tokens? Deposit and stablecoin balances are tracked publicly on DefiLlama, and fee activity is recorded on-chain, so the comparison can be revisited as new data arrives. Ethereum's larger balances support Pal's argument about financial depth today. Judging whether ETH or SOL offers better value, however, also requires weighing those developments against the price investors already pay.

This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute investment advice. Pal's comments reflect his own views, and network metrics can change.