Solana vs Ethereum: Which Blockchain Holds Up Better During a Market Crash?

Updated

October 17, 2025

Gambar Solana vs Ethereum: Which Blockchain Holds Up Better During a Market Crash?

Jakarta, Pintu News – During the recent crypto market sell-off triggered by Trump’s tariffs against China, the crypto market experienced a significant drop. Over $19 billion in assets were liquidated, making it one of the largest single-day losses in crypto history.

Bitcoin briefly fell below the $105K level, while major altcoins also experienced sharp declines.

Solana Resilient to Surge in Activity Despite Depressed Market

The recent massive sell-off in the crypto market has been a severe test for major blockchains, exposing the stark difference between Solana and Ethereum when under pressure.

Interestingly, Solana showed its resilience by being able to handle around 1,200-1,300 transactions per second despite being at the peak of market chaos. Block confirmation times only ranged from 400-450 milliseconds. Transaction fees briefly spiked to 20-30 cents, but soon dropped back below a penny.

Throughout the period, Solana’s network remained stable without experiencing any major slowdowns or bottlenecks, confirming its ability to remain reliable amid extreme market pressures.

Ethereum Experiences a Slowdown and a Spike in Fees

On the other hand, Ethereum is struggling with the chaotic market conditions. Its underlying network is only capable of processing about 13-15 transactions per second, with block creation times slowing down to 14-15 seconds.

Gas fees even jumped over $500 per transaction during severe congestion, making most users unable to transact and causing DeFi wallets and services to be delayed.

While Solana continues to run normally, it shows that recent enhancements such as Firedancer, QUIC, and the stake-weighted QoS mechanism have significantly improved its network performance.

When the largest liquidation event in crypto history hit last Friday, $ETH choked, but $SOL didn’t.

During peak stress, Solana sustained 1,225 TPS, finalized blocks in 350ms, and saw average fees peak at just $0.25 before quickly returning below $0.01.

Ethereum struggled to… pic.twitter.com/OMzWsxmXFh
— DeFi Dev Corp. (DFDV) (@defidevcorp) October 13, 2025

“If users are unable to transact and transactions cannot be processed, then the network can essentially be considered non-functional. Under high load conditions, blockchain must remain accessible, affordable, and reliable,” said treasury firm DefiDevCorp.

Solana has No Problem with Market Crash

Crypto researcher Aylo also shared his experience during the crypto market crash. He has active DeFi assets and positions on the Solana and Ethereum networks. As a result, he reported experiencing no issues at all while using Solana.

In contrast, Ethereum, according to him, is almost unusable due to very high fees. Even wallet services like Rabby are experiencing disruptions.

I had assets and DeFi positions open on both Solana and Ethereum when shit hit the fan last Friday.

I had zero issues using Solana.

Ethereum was unusable due to the costs as it always is during market crashes + Rabby also went down.

ETH maxis should be much angrier about…
— Aylo (@alpha_pls) October 13, 2025

Aylo concluded that Solana is the most reliable network and performs best at high loads, although this is not yet fully reflected in Solana’s current valuation.

This suggests that Solana’s high-throughput-focused design is better able to handle extreme stress than Ethereum, which prioritizes security at its base layer.

Solana’s resilience under pressure

While Ethereum scalability solutions like Arbitrum and Base work well enough under normal conditions, the mainnet can get overwhelmed during market panics. In contrast to that, Solana, which was designed for speed from the start, is able to handle the pressure without any hiccups.

With an uptime record of more than 20 months since the beginning of 2023, Solana proves that speed and reliability can be a serious competitor to the large, decentralized Ethereum ecosystem.

If this trend continues, Solana’s resilience during market turmoil could make it the top choice for traders, developers, and DeFi protocols – displacing Ethereum’s dominance.

Both have their strengths: Ethereum excels in decentralization and a long track record, while Solana emphasizes speed and low transaction fees.

However, the latest market crisis confirms that performance and reliability under high pressure are now factors that are increasingly taken into account.

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*Disclaimer

This content aims to enrich readers’ information. Pintu collects this information from various relevant sources and is not influenced by outside parties. Note that an asset’s past performance does not determine its projected future performance. Crypto trading activities have high risk and volatility, always do your own research and use cold cash before investing. All activities of buying and selling bitcoin and other crypto asset investments are the responsibility of the reader.

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