The co-founder of popular cryptocurrency derivatives trading platform BitMEX, Arthur Hayes, has set the cryptocurrency community abuzz with his prediction that Aptos ($APT) will overtake Solana ($SOL) as the second-most prominent Layer 1 (L1) blockchain, behind only Ethereum, within the next two to three years.
Hayes, known for his sharp market insights, offered this glimpse into the future during a recent interview with macro analyst Raoul Pal on the Coin Bureau YouTube channel. While details backing his claim remain scarce, Hayes promised a more thorough explanation in September.
Solana’s rose to prominence in 2020 as it addressed Ethereum’s limitations in scalability, transaction speed, and cost and the boom came after Circle expanded its USDC stablecoin onto the Solana network, in a move that came shortly after Tether’s USDT was added.
The cryptocurrency’s price plunged as before collapsing FTX had heavily supported the Solana ecosystem and was heavily invested in a number of tokens on the network, including SOL itself. The collapse affected Solana by association, but the network has been steadily recovering.
Solana’s climb to prominence accelerated further with the launch of memecoins like BONK in December 2022 and dogwifhat (WIF) in November 2023. Solana’s ecosystem has been seeing growing adoption, with its Saga smartphone, which once faced sluggish sales, selling out recently over a lucrative 30 million BONK token airdrop for each new owner of the phone.
Notably, Wall Street giant JPMorgan Chase has expressed skepticism about the potential approval by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) of a spot Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF), or on the approval of such a fund offering exposure to other altcoins.
Aptos, contrary to Solana which has seen a number of outages, boasts a record of zero downtime since its launch, establishing itself as a dependable alternative in the digital currency landscape. Its foundation lies in “Move,” a novel smart contract programming language crafted by engineers who previously worked on Meta Platforms’ Diem project.
Though Diem itself was ultimately shelved, the expertise and technological advancements have been channeled into Aptos, suggesting its potential for commercial viability and widespread adoption. Yet, Aptos currently lacks a robust DeFi ecosystem or the kind of memecoin activity that fueled Solana’s recent surge.
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