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Today, we’ve got SOL vs. ETH, sandwich attacks decreasing, and an ICYMI from this week in Solana land:

‘Solana may underperform Ethereum in the near term’: Standard Chartered researcher 

As a card-carrying member of the “nothing ever happens” club, many of my thoughts on whether or not news has been priced in can be summarized by this classic Reddit post. 

Nevertheless, one of my guests on the Lightpeed podcast this week explained why ETH has been slowly gaining ground on solana — and why he believes that trend may continue.

I hosted Geoff Kendrick, the head of digital assets research at Standard Chartered, to explain his Solana thesis. Standard Chartered is a relatively large global bank based out of the UK. This Solana report was the bank’s first, in what may be a show of Solana’s growing relevance to institutional investors. 

The report is bullish on SOL, offering a price target of $275 by year’s end and a target of $500 by the end 2029, but it predicts that ETH will outperform SOL in the short to medium term. I found this surprising given how bad the vibes surrounding ETH have been in recent months — and how mostly positive things have been in Solana land. 

SOL consistently leads ETH in real economic value (a Blockworks Research metric for the tips and fees that measure demand to land transactions on a blockchain) despite Solana having a quarter of Ethereum’s market cap. ETH’s big tailwind is its L2s, which have helped the blockchain scale but may be damaging to ETH’s ability to accrue value since they take on a lot of trading volume, but pay relatively little in fees to Ethereum. Geoff believes the bad vibes surrounding ETH are already “priced in.”

“There was a lot of debate in 2024 about, ‘do [L2s] add or subtract value,’” Kendrick said. “So, let’s say that a lot of that story has already played out in a relative sense.” He later added: “For Solana, you came off massive multi-year lows post-FTX, had a comeback in 2023 thanks to memecoin activity, but now that memecoin trading is post-peak, Solana may underperform Ethereum in the near term.”

Kendrick argued that the market trades Solana at a discount relative to its economic activity from memecoins because it views memecoin trading as unsustainable. I would note that memecoin activity has proven more sticky than many might have predicted — pump.fun generated $50 million in revenue last month, despite a dip in usage — but we’ll have to see how all of this plays out over time. 

Kendrick’s thesis has been correct over the past month, at least. The ratio of SOL’s price to ETH’s price is down nearly 15%.

— Jack Kubinec

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There are fewer sandwich attacks happening these days:

Data from the free sandwich attack tracker sandwiched.me shows that users have extracted 17,000 SOL, worth some $2.4 million at current prices, via sandwich attacks in the past 30 days. 

That’s a not-insignificant amount, but the number of sandwiches, victims and SOL extracted are all down from when Bloxroute CEO Uri Klarman posted this same 30-day dashboard on May 15.

— Jack Kubinec

ICYMI — Stories you may have missed from Solana land this week

• Jupiter DAO has paused community voting through the end of 2025 to focus on product execution and Jupiverse expansion following heated backlash over team control of governance. The DAO will maintain ASR rewards and support existing workgroups, but no new JUP emissions or proposals will proceed until a redesigned governance model returns in 2026. The move comes just days after DAO members slammed the team’s voting power as “unacceptable,” citing incidents where vested tokens gave insiders outsized influence over recent proposals.

• Block Stranding, the first onchain MMORPG with real-time, gas-free gameplay, went live on Solana. The game logs every in-game action as a transaction. It runs on MagicBlock’s Ephemeral Rollups, achieving sub-50ms latency and thousands of fee-less interactions per second without clogging the base layer. A recent stress test hit over 100 TPS as LLM-powered agents executed 120,000 actions in 20 minutes with asset ownership fully onchain.

• OKX Wallet is bringing Bitcoin-native liquidity to Solana with the launch of xBTC, a wrapped BTC asset now live on Kamino and Orca. Users can pair xBTC with JitoSOL or stablecoins to earn high-yield incentives during a six-month rewards phase offering up to $1 million across select pools. The rollout gives BTC capital a native route into Solana’s DeFi stack.

• Dialect released its Universal Inbox on Solana, a mobile-first communication layer that unifies alerts and updates across the ecosystem into one wallet-linked feed. Now live as Jupiter Radar in the Jupiter Mobile app, it delivers push notifications for tokens, APYs, portfolio changes, governance activity and more. Powered by Dialect’s Alerts Stack, it gives developers a zero-code path to broadcast updates. It opens a high-fidelity distribution channel for apps to engage users directly through their wallets.

• Circle expanded its Cross-Chain Transfer Protocol (CCTP v2) to Solana. The protocol uses a Circle-attested burn-and-mint flow that removes the need for trust-heavy bridges or fragmented liquidity. V2 introduces programmable “Hooks” for post-transfer actions and “Fast Transfer” for near-instant settlement. The company says that day-one support includes Interport, Router Protocol and the native CCTP interface, with more apps expected soon.

— Jeffrey Albus

A message from Leah Wald, CEO of Sol Strategies: