Differences in transaction fees play a major role in differences between Ethereum and Solana. When comparing Decentralized Exchange volume, it is trivial on a low-cost chain to wash tokens at any arbitrary price if the issuer owns both supply and the majority of liquidity.

One available adjustment is to filter to DEX swaps where both tokens in the swap are listed on a Lending Market with sizeable deposits. This serves as a proxy for tokens becoming too expensive to wash trade (because the issuer no longer owns all of the liquidity).

Here, tokens listed on SAVE (formerly Solend) with at least $100K in deposits are compared to tokens listed on Ethereum listed on AAVE with at least $1M in deposits.

Note, AAVE does not list any memecoins even in isolated markets, so SHIB and PEPE are added for reference.

Stablecoin
USDT USDC DAI USDe PYUSD LUSD FRAX GHO

Major Token
WETH WBTC AAVE LINK cbBTC MKR UNI BAL tBTC LDO RPL ENS CRV SNX

Liquid Staking
wstETH weETH rETH cbETH ETHx osETH

Memecoin
SHIB PEPE

Stablecoin
USDC USDT PYUSD

Major Token
SOL ETH SLND RAY JUP PYTH

Liquid Staking Derivative
mSOL bSOL JitoSOL haSOL JupSOL sSOL

Memecoin
WIF BONK POPCAT BOBAOPPA

• While it's true that low transaction fees make it trivial to pump naïve metrics like active users, new tokens, and raw dex volume - we can adjust for that and get a closer to apples to apples comparison of where chains stand relative to one another.

• Here, we use Lending Market adoption ($100k+ in token deposits on Solana SAVE (formerly Solend), $1M+ in token deposits on Ethereum AAVE) as a proxy for a token's legitimacy (i.e., liquidity is too widely owned for the issuer to wash trade at scale). This Lending Market Listing adjustment reduces the scope of tokens being analyzed and we look at only trades between the tokens on these lists.
  

  The major growth targets for Solana to reach 50% of Ethereum market cap are roughly:

• More stablecoin adoption, especially in lending markets as a means of credit expansion. USDC, USDT, and PYUSD are all growing on Solana, with USDC leading the pack on Solend lending deposits ($50M, $10M, $2M respectively).

• More robust transaction fee markets so that SOL emissions to validators can be reduced (currently ~80-90% of Solana validator rewards are emissions instead of transaction fees. The goal is for tx fees/usage to replace this over time).

• Already Adjusted DEX Volume on Solana is ~35% of ETH mainnet (~20% of ETH Mainnet + Op/Arb/Base if you bundle in the major EVM L2s).

• As Solana firedancer goes live enabling faster mempools and consensus: more blockspace, protocols, and "legitimate" tokens should enable more robust transaction fee markets and eventually a reduction in emissions.