Forget Bitcoin: This Crypto Is the Smarter Buy Right Now

Bitcoin (BTC 3.98%), the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency, has lost nearly 50% of its value since reaching its all-time high of over $126,000 last October. That pullback was caused by elevated interest rates, which drove investors toward more conservative investments, leveraged liquidations, and a lack of new near-term catalysts.

Bitcoin could still have a bright future, but it might be smarter to accumulate some smaller altcoins with more upside potential as the bulls look the other way. One of those altcoins is Solana (SOL 4.46%), which lost nearly 60% of its value over the past six months.

Image source: Getty Images.

The differences between Solana and Bitcoin

Unlike Bitcoin, which is still mined with the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, Solana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) token that can’t be mined. That makes Solana more similar to Ethereum (ETH 3.75%), the PoS blockchain leader, than Bitcoin.

Like Ethereum, Solana supports staking (locking up tokens to earn interest-like rewards) and smart contracts (for developing decentralized applications and other tokens). However, Solana’s native Layer 1 (L1) blockchain can achieve real-world speeds of 2,000 to 5,000 transactions per second (TPS), while Ethereum’s L1 blockchain tops out at about 30 TPS.

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CRYPTO: SOL

Solana

Today’s Change

(-4.46%) $-3.90

Current Price

$83.66

Key Data Points

Market Cap

$48B

Day’s Range

$82.70 - $87.56

52wk Range

$70.61 - $252.78

Volume

4B

Solana achieves those blazing speeds by integrating its own proof-of-history (PoH) mechanism, which timestamps them before they’re validated, into its PoS blockchain. Solana’s speed drew in 17,708 active developers at the end of 2025, making it the second-largest blockchain-based developer platform after Ethereum, which served 31,869 developers.

Its speed makes it a useful platform for settling payments. Visa uses it to settle stablecoin payments, while **Shopify **relies on Solana Pay to handle its cryptocurrency payments. Those real-world applications make Solana more useful than other altcoins. Solana’s first spot price exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with staking features – which should attract more attention from institutional investors – were also approved last year. It even launched two Android phones, the Saga and the Seeker, over the past two years.

Solana has a circulating supply of 572 million tokens with no supply limit, so it can’t be valued by its scarcity in the same way as Bitcoin, which has a supply cap of 21 million tokens. Instead, investors value it by the rapid growth of its developer ecosystem and its enterprise partnerships.

Why could Solana outperform Bitcoin?

Solana, with a market cap of $48 billion, is much smaller than Bitcoin, valued at $1.3 trillion, or Ether, worth $240 billion. If interest rates decline, the macro environment stabilizes, and the crypto market heats up again, more investors could flock toward the smaller altcoins with more growth potential – like Solana – instead of blue chip tokens like Bitcoin and Ether. Its new ETFs could accelerate that shift by drawing in more institutional investors. While Bitcoin still has plenty of upside potential, I wouldn’t be surprised if Solana bounces back with bigger gains this year.