Solana (SOL) price fell about 17% over the past week, but the real damage sits beneath the chart. Capital left the ecosystem, long-term holders capitulated, and trading activity faded together.
The price drop was the surface. On-chain, three measures show the selloff ran deeper than a routine pullback, and they explain why the bounce off $60, the latest low, still looks fragile.
Capital Actually Left the Solana Ecosystem
The first crack is in total value locked, or TVL. It is the dollar value of assets deposited in a network’s DeFi protocols. Solana’s DeFi-only TVL sits near $4.87 billion (excluding liquid staking), down about 9.55% over the past week and roughly 15% over 30 days.
A falling TVL means users pulled liquidity out of Solana’s apps rather than simply marking existing deposits lower. That points to capital leaving the network, not just prices dropping.
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The exit raises a sharper question about who was selling, and the holder data provides the answer.
Even Long-Term Solana Holders Left
The deepest damage shows in the holder’s behavior. Hodler net position change, a metric that tracks whether long-term holders of 155 days or more are adding or reducing supply, fell sharply amid the TVL and price decline.
The figure dropped from about 3.27 million SOL on May 31 to roughly 2.36 million SOL by June 6, as the price slid toward its low. When the most patient holders sell into weakness, it shows conviction broken, not just speculative interest.
That loss of long-term confidence is the clearest sign the selloff was structural, and the trading data confirms it.
Trading Activity and DEX Dominance Both Slid
The cooling shows in volume. Centralized exchange volume for SOL peaked at $7.03 billion on June 6, the height of the selloff, then dropped back as the panic eased, leaving turnover at its lowest since that spike.
Do note that the 7-day rising trend is due to the high volume days on June 5 and June 6.
Solana’s DEX dominance, its share of total decentralized exchange volume across crypto, is also slipping. It sits near 22.6%, below its 60-day average of 23.3% and down from a near-term high of about 30.4% on June 4.
Falling dominance shows the weakness is structural, not just a SOL price move, as capital rotates away from Solana’s on-chain trading.
Together, the three measures explain what really broke during the crash.
The Rebound Looks Fragile Until One On-Chain Level Clears
There is one tentative positive. As Solana price bounced about 13% off its June 6 low near $60, hodler net position change turned higher again. This hints that long-term holders started buying once the price stabilized.
This is not a price prediction, but the on-chain cost basis shows the hurdle ahead. The cost basis distribution heatmap, which maps the prices at which holders actually acquired their SOL, shows a dense cluster of supply near $74 to $75.
Holders who bought there tend to sell when the price returns to their entry, creating resistance.
Until DeFi TVL stabilizes and that supply zone clears, the rebound stays fragile. Whether long-term holders keep buying or fading activity wins out will decide whether Solana’s price builds on its bounce or slips back toward its low.
Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko publicly rejected Senator Bernie Sanders’ AI jobs warning. The senator argues artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics could wipe out millions of American jobs.
Sanders paired the warning with a renewed call to ban super PACs. Yakovenko answered with a string of posts defending markets, profit, and decentralized finance (DeFi).
Sanders’ AI Jobs Warning Meets a Free Market Rebuttal
The Vermont senator said Congress has abandoned workers threatened by automation because of industry money.
Is Congress doing anything to help the millions of workers who could lose their jobs to AI and robotics? No.
They’re intimidated by the hundreds of millions the AI industry is pouring into super PACs.
The spending claim tracks with disclosures. Leading the Future, an AI super PAC network backed by OpenAI president Greg Brockman and Andreessen Horowitz, raised $125 million in late 2025.
The group has pledged at least $100 million for the midterms.
“Senders [Sanders] is focusing on hypothetical sci fi problems because he is completely f’ing useless at solving any real problems,” the Solana co-founder posted in the thread.
Capital, Trillionaires, and the DeFi Defense
Yakovenko widened the argument across more than a dozen replies. Billionaires hold capital rather than hoarded wealth, he argued, and surplus production is what raises living standards.
He also claimed 500 more trillionaires would roughly double the global standard of living, all else equal. Reportedly, his family left the USSR with $50 per person, he shared, casting central planning rather than AI as the real threat to workers.
The thread looped back to crypto. Any profitable market will be rebuilt endlessly as a smart contract, he wrote, months after he gave away code for a perpetuals exchange.
There is no last train. Anything that is generating a profit that can be built as a smart contract will be built, over and over. That’s the whole point of DeFi. Reduce the cost of finance to the cost of software.
Solana (SOL) traded at $65.36 at press time, up nearly 6% in 24 hours. The coming primaries will test whose framing carries more weight with lawmakers.
Wall Street giant Goldman Sachs has made a notable shift in its crypto-related exchange-traded (ETF) fund positions, according to a recent filing submitted to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).
The update shows the firm exiting XRP- and Solana (SOL)-linked ETF exposure, while also trimming its Ethereum (ETH) ETF holdings. At the same time, the filing shows it opened a new position tied to one of the largest decentralized exchanges (DEXs).
Goldman Sachs Exits XRP And Solana ETFs
The story starts with Goldman’s XRP ETF exposure going into the end of Q4 2025. At that point, the bank held nearly $154 million worth of XRP-related ETFs from issuers including Bitwise, Franklin Templeton, Grayscale, and 21Shares.
Those holdings made Goldman Sachs one of the largest institutional holders of XRP ETF products at the time. The latest SEC disclosure, however, shows that its XRP ETF positions were removed entirely, reflecting a full exit during the first quarter.
A similar change appears with Solana-linked products. Goldman Sachs had previously disclosed that it held exposure across multiple Solana investment products, including the Grayscale Solana Trust ETF, the Bitwise Solana Staking ETF, and the Fidelity Solana Fund.
However, just like XRP, those Solana-related ETF positions also disappeared in Goldman’s Q1 filing. In other words, Goldman fully exited both XRP- and Solana-linked ETF holdings by the first quarter of 2026, with no remaining trace of those positions in the updated portfolio disclosure.
Even with these exits, Goldman Sachs did not leave the crypto ETF space entirely. The firm still held roughly $700 million in Bitcoin ETFs. Still, its posture toward Ethereum was more cautious: Goldman cut its Ethereum ETF exposure by about 70%, bringing the total down to approximately $114 million.
New Bet On Hyperliquid
What makes the change more interesting is that Goldman Sachs appears to be redeploying at least some of that capital into other parts of the crypto market.
Alongside the ETF reductions and exits, the bank opened a new position tied to Hyperliquid (HYPE). According to the filing, Goldman acquired roughly 654,630 shares of Hyperliquid Strategies (PURR), valued at about $3.3 million.
Beyond Hyperliquid, Goldman Sachs’ trading activity also shows a new wave of exposure across several crypto-linked equities. The bank increased positions in Circle (CRCL), Galaxy (GLXY), and Coinbase (COIN) shares.
At the time of writing, Hyperliquid’s native token, HYPE, was trading at around $45. It has been one of the best-performing tokens over the past month, with gains of 10% in the last two weeks alone.
Featured image created with OpenArt, chart from TradingView.com
The Solana price has struggled to shake off its early-year woes despite a slightly improved general market climate in recent weeks. After falling from a nearly $150 valuation in the first quarter of 2026, the altcoin has been stuck within a consolidation range between $75 and $100 over the past few months.
The upper boundary of this consolidation zone proved formidable after the Solana price failed to fully capitalize on the injection of bullish momentum (triggered by news of the CLARITY Act passing the US Senate banking committee). A popular market analyst on the social media platform X has identified this specific resistance level and what lies on the other side for Solana.
A Break Above $98 Could Mean A Sustained Rally For SOL Price
In a recent post on the X platform, crypto pundit Ali Martinez pinpointed $98 as the level to break for the Solana price to reach its upside potential. According to the analyst, the cryptocurrency could embark on an approximately 30% rally if it sustains a break above this overhead resistance.
Martinez highlighted that the SOL token has been trading within a “well-defined” horizontal channel, with the lower and upper boundaries at $78 and $98, respectively. As a result of the CLARITY Act-induced market-wide rally, Solana’s price enjoyed some bullish momentum, only to be quickly truncated by the $98 ceiling.
Having bounced back from this rejection around the pivot point at $88, Martinez believes the altcoin could be returning to the channel ceiling for another breakout attempt. The crypto trader noted that if the price of Solana does manage to break and close above the $98 (on the daily timeframe), investors could see a surge toward $107.
However, that is only an immediate target, as Martinez believes the Solana price could travel further up towards its secondary target at $117. As hinted earlier, this secondary target represents a more than 30% uptick from the current price point.
At the same time, Martinez offered an alternative scenario where the $98 resistance refuses to give way. According to the market analyst, the price of Solana could experience a pullback to the $88 pivot point — or even to as low as the channel floor at $78 — if the resistance continues to hold strong.
In any case, the general market condition would need to improve if the altcoin is to enjoy sustained upside, especially given how sensitive financial markets have been to broader market dynamics in 2026.
Solana Price At A Glance
As of this writing, the price of SOL stands at around $89.33, reflecting an over 3% decline in the past 24 hours.
Pump.fun traders, after a long stretch of weak performance, are beginning to see a clear turnaround in 2026, according to fresh data from CoinGecko.
Between April 2024 and late 2025, most traders exiting positions on the popular Solana-based meme coin platform ended each month with losses. During this period, the share of profitable wallets rarely crossed the 50% mark and fell as low as 30.1% in June 2025, amid significant underperformance among active participants.
Pump.fun Profitability Improves
The trend began to reverse in early 2026. In February, Pump.fun recorded almost 57% of traders in profit, followed by a sharp rise to 70% in March and 73.3% in April 2026. In April 2026, profits were heavily concentrated at the lower end of the spectrum.
CoinGecko found that the largest cohort, about 2.05 million wallets or 65.1%, earned between $1 and $500. Another 87,000 wallets, or 2.8%, made between $500 and $1,000, while 169,000 wallets, representing 5.4%, booked gains above $1,000.
On the loss side, 793,000 wallets, or around 25%, lost between $1 and $500, while 22,000 wallets (0.7%) lost $500 to $1,000, and 24,000 wallets (0.8%) saw losses of more than $1,000. The data indicated that both gains and losses are largely clustered in small amounts, which “reflects the small-size, high-frequency nature of memecoin trading, where participants typically deploy small amounts of capital.”
The report also noted that the improvement in profitability may be tied to a shakeout of weaker participants, as monthly active wallets fell from a peak of 5.2 million in May 2025 to 1.8 million in December 2025. The subsequent recovery in early 2026 points to a smaller but potentially more experienced trader base returning to the platform.
“This decline can be seen as the exit of the broader retail crowd and subsequent recovery in wallet counts from early 2026 onward implies the return of a more selective, experienced trader base, naturally shifting the profitability distribution in their favour.”
Token Policy Change
Last week, Pump.fun announced it had burned all previously repurchased PUMP tokens and introduced a new buyback-and-burn program funded by 50% of future net revenue. The project said the burned tokens were worth about $370 million and represented 36% of the circulating supply.
It added that, facing trust issues over the longevity of its business, the certainty of buybacks, and how repurchased tokens would be used. According to Pump.fun, the move was meant to address uncertainty through a community-first approach going forward.
Bitcoin, Ripple’s token, Solana’s SOL, and several other altcoins made impressive moves over the past few hours, which was rather unexpected given the Sunday market sentiment and lack of major developments.
Interestingly, these recent gains coincided with Donald Trump’s latest message on Iran.
The statement on Truth Social from the POTUS reads that Iran has been “playing games with the United States, and the rest of the World, for 47 years.” He also placed significant blame on former President Barack Obama, saying the situation hit “pay dirt” during his time in office.
“He was not only good to them, he was great, actually going to their side, jettisoning Israel, and all other Allies, and giving Iran a major and very powerful new lease on life. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars, and 1.7 Billion Dollars in green cash, flown into Tehran, was handed to them on a silver platter. Every Bank in D.C., Virginia, and Maryland was emptied out — It was so much money that when it arrived, the Iranian Thugs had no idea what to do with it. They had never seen money like this, and never will again. It was taken off the plane in suitcases and satchels, and the Iranians couldn’t believe their luck.”
After also blaming Joe Biden, Trump said Iran will be laughing no longer at the USA. This statement comes after reports that Iran had sent their response to the US’s latest peace proposal. However, there’s no further information as of press time regarding the actual decision.
As mentioned above, many crypto assets are in the green now. Bitcoin’s gains are among the most modest, but the asset still tapped $81,600. XRP has stolen the show from the larger-cap alts, surging by over 5% daily to a multi-week peak of just over $1.50.
SOL has risen to almost $100 after a 3.5% daily increase, ETH is well above $2,350, and ADA has gained over 5% to sit close to $0.29.
A third-party provider failure caused Revolut’s app to show wildly inaccurate crypto prices on Friday, the company confirmed, after users flooded social media with screenshots of Bitcoin listed at just 2 cents.
Third-Party Provider Blamed For Pricing Chaos
Revolut acknowledged the problem in a public statement, saying engineers were working on a fix and urging customers to check its status page for updates.
Hi. We want to help resolve the issues you’re facing with the Bitcoin price notification. We’re currently experiencing issues affecting some of the app’s functionalities. Please be assured that our colleagues are working on this as we speak. Please keep an eye on our status page…
The glitch wasn’t limited to Bitcoin. Users reported seeing simultaneous price drops across XRP, Solana, and even stablecoins like USDT and USDC — assets designed to hold steady at one dollar.
Screenshots shared on X and Reddit showed Bitcoin’s 24-hour chart registering a roughly 50% intraday plunge, with the price briefly anchoring near $39,900 before snapping back.
Some users also received push notifications warning that BTC had hit a 52-week low of 2 cents.
According to Revolut, The price of Bitcoin has just dropped to $0.02
Pricing data on major aggregators showed nothing unusual during the same window. Bitcoin’s price on CoinMarketCap and CoinGecko held steady, with no sign of any crash in derivatives markets either. The anomaly appeared entirely contained within Revolut’s app.
Ranveer Arora, a former PwC quantitative trading lead and co-founder of Altura.trade, told reporters two explanations are in play.
The first is a corrupt data tick pushed through Revolut’s pricing system — a single bad data point that briefly anchored the chart before being corrected.
Because Revolut is not an exchange and pulls prices from outside providers, one faulty input can be enough to produce exactly this kind of chart distortion.
The second possibility is a transient liquidity gap. Revolut’s order book is shallower than what you’d find on a full exchange, so a large sell order could theoretically exhaust available bids and print a sharp downward wick before prices recover.
Arora noted, however, that the lack of matching prints on any other platform makes the data feed explanation more likely.
Why Retail Apps Face Unique Data Risks
Marc Tillement, director of blockchain price oracle Pyth Data Association, said the episode shows how quickly a single bad data point can distort price perception — particularly in retail-facing systems where users may not think to cross-check what they’re seeing.
Tillement said that as markets grow more data-dependent, the reliability of pricing infrastructure becomes central to how much traders can trust what’s in front of them.
Transparent, verifiable data layers, he argued, are what separate a glitch from a crisis.
Featured image from Pixabay, chart from TradingView
Visa said its settlement pilot for stablecoins now supports nine blockchains and has reached a run rate of $7 billion a year.
The company announced on April 29 that it added Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon and Tempo to a pilot that already used Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana and Stellar.
Visa said the annualized settlement run rate is up 50% from the prior quarter.
The pilot remains bounded by Visa’s own language, but the signal is in where the volume sits. Stablecoins are entering the part of payments consumers rarely see, the settlement layer that moves value between issuers, acquirers, banks, program managers and treasury systems after a transaction has already been authorized.
That makes the update a settlement-infrastructure signal as much as a blockchain support list. Visa is testing whether stablecoins can become a parallel settlement option inside payment infrastructure that already touches banks, card programs and merchants across markets.
The operational point is direct: crypto adoption is moving into the back office before it becomes visible at the checkout screen.
The conclusion has limits. The company described a pilot and support, gave a run rate for stablecoin settlement, and left the split by chain, stablecoin, partner, and geography undisclosed.
That keeps things bounded: the network is adding optional settlement rails, while traditional settlement remains part of the stack.
Visa has been building toward this point for several years. In 2023, the company said it had moved millions of USDC between partners over Solana and Ethereum to settle fiat-denominated VisaNet payments.
That announcement followed an earlier Crypto.com issuer pilot and expanded the settlement work to merchant acquirers Worldpay and Nuvei.
The operational issue is familiar in card payments. A consumer gets near-instant authorization at the point of sale, but funds still have to move between the issuing bank and the merchant’s bank.
Visa’s treasury and settlement systems sit inside that process, moving value across currencies and institutions.
In December 2025, U.S. issuer and acquirer partners gained the ability to settle with Visa in USDC, with Cross River Bank and Lead Bank initially settling over Solana.
The company cited faster funds movement, seven-day availability, and resilience across weekends and holidays.
The April release also connected the chain expansion to Visa’s stablecoin-linked card programs, which it said numbered more than 130 programs across more than 50 countries.
That makes the nine-chain footprint part of a broader payment operating model, beyond a ledger experiment.
The new run rate gives that timeline a sharper shape. The December 2025 U.S. launch put the prior annualized stablecoin settlement baseline above $3.5 billion.
The April update puts the run rate at $7 billion, with five more blockchains added to the pilot.
Before the April update
Added in April
Operational signal
Avalanche, Ethereum, Solana, Stellar
Arc, Base, Canton, Polygon, Tempo
Visa is widening the settlement pilot across public chains, payment-focused networks and institution-oriented infrastructure.
The table serves as a footprint rather than a volume map. The run rate applies to the pilot as a whole; the available disclosure leaves that volume undivided across the nine supported networks.
The sequence also shows a shift in who the product is for. The early work proved that USDC could move between card ecosystem participants.
The current phase asks whether the same settlement logic can be offered across a wider menu of rails while reducing the need for each partner to build separate crypto operations from scratch.
What the chain mix shows
The five additions suggest the types of environments Visa wants available to partners.
Arc is a stablecoin-native Layer 1 created by Circle. It brings USDC-denominated fees, optional privacy, sub-second deterministic finality and direct integration with Circle’s stack.
That makes Arc relevant to payment flows where predictable costs, stablecoin liquidity and transfer guarantees count more than token speculation.
Arc’s public materials also describe public testnet status, which keeps production claims bounded.
Base brings a different route into the same problem. Visa described Base as powered by Coinbase, while Base offers USDC payments that settle in seconds, use low gas costs and can be funded from a Base Account or Coinbase Account.
Base connects wallets, payment tooling, and exchange-linked liquidity into a consumer and developer surface.
Canton adds the institutional privacy layer. Visa had already said in March that it would become a Canton Super Validator, helping banks and financial institutions explore privacy-preserving payments, settlement and treasury use cases.
Canton centers stablecoin payments on need-to-know privacy, so counterparties, amounts and strategies can remain visible only to the parties that need them, unlike many open blockchains.
As an analytical reading of the chain mix, Polygon and Tempo fit the payment-infrastructure side of the roster. Polygon emphasizes global payments, stablecoin liquidity and lower-cost transactions.
Tempo emphasizes dedicated payment lanes, stablecoin-native gas, payment metadata for reconciliation and deterministic settlement.
Together, the additions create a wider operating menu across chain types. One partner may need low-cost stablecoin movement.
Another may need privacy controls for regulated finance. Another may value Coinbase-connected payment tooling.
Visa’s role is to make those differences usable through a common settlement layer.
The result is a portfolio of settlement options across chain types. That portfolio lets Visa present stablecoins as infrastructure that can adapt to partner constraints, from regulated privacy to low-cost throughput, while keeping the payment-network relationship in the center.
The adoption signal is operational
The broader market context supports the shift while keeping price moves out of the frame. As of April 30, the crypto market stood at around $2.55 trillion, while DefiLlama put total stablecoin market capitalization at around $319.802 billion.
USDC sits in that context as a core settlement asset used for payments, treasury management, collateral, and cross-chain liquidity.
Ethereum, Solana, and Polygon Ecosystem Token are large or payment-relevant networks and tokens that can carry settlement infrastructure while keeping price data in the background.
Stablecoins already have enough liquidity and operating history for large payment networks to treat them as infrastructure options.
The adoption test shifts from whether a consumer chooses a wallet over a card to whether payment firms can use stablecoins to move value after the customer-facing transaction is done.
The market-side thesis has been building. A January analysis of BlackRock’s stablecoin thesis argued that dollar tokens were shifting from trading utility to settlement infrastructure within and alongside traditional finance.
Visa’s update provides a current operating example for that thesis. The company is connecting stablecoin settlement to issuers, acquirers, U.S. banks, and stablecoin-linked card programs.
Its March expansion with Bridge said stablecoin-linked Visa cards were live in 18 countries, with planned expansion to more than 100 countries.
That release also said issuers and acquirers involved in those programs could settle with Visa using stablecoins over supported networks.
Regulation sits in the background. Treasury framed the U.S. GENIUS Act as providing regulatory clarity for a market it expects could become much larger.
Visa tied the expansion to pilots, banks, partners, and supported networks, while the policy debate helps explain why payment stablecoins are drawing more mainstream attention.
The $7 billion run rate shows real activity, while the lack of a chain-by-chain breakdown leaves the depth of each rail unclear.
The nine-chain footprint shows optionality, while the pilot label keeps the conclusion bounded.
The adoption signal is therefore specific. Stablecoins are taking on a role beyond trading-market distribution.
Within Visa’s settlement pilot, they are becoming a treasury and settlement option for institutions already within mainstream payments.
The next test is whether that option remains a specialist rail for selected partners or becomes a routine part of how global payment firms move value after the consumer never sees the transaction again.
A single Solana wallet lost about $150,000 buying Scam Altman (SCAM) near the top of its launch. The trader sold close to the bottom after SCAM crashed 95% in 24 hours, on-chain analytics firm Bubblemaps reported.
The same address, tagged AuKRRB…L7sN, also dropped roughly $81,000 on UNC and $14,000 on ASTEROID in earlier trades. The three-token streak put combined realized losses at about $245,000 in a single week.
How the Scam Altman Trade Went Wrong
The Scam Altman token launched on Pump.fun this week as Elon Musk’s lawsuit against Sam Altman and OpenAI opened in federal court in Oakland.
Musk spent much of the morning calling the OpenAI chief “Scam” Altman across multiple X posts. Solana traders read the nickname as a tradable meme and raced to mint a token before competitors could.
Within eight hours, SCAM hit a market cap above $10 million on roughly $19.6 million of volume. The peak briefly approached $20 million before sellers stepped in.
The reversal was equally fast. SCAM shed close to 88% of its value over the next 24 hours. The drop from the highlighted wallet’s entry to its exit reached about 95%.
What Bubblemaps Showed
Bubblemaps shared a post with a visualization of SCAM holders that flagged clusters of interconnected wallets. That pattern often signals insider distribution or coordinated buying on Solana meme coin launches.
Having a bad day?
This guy lost $150k yesterday buying $SCAM right before it dumped -95%.
The map placed wallet AuKRRB…L7sN inside an active buyer cluster near the top of the chart. Bubblemaps shared a direct map so traders could inspect the wallet relationships themselves.
The same trader’s earlier picks tell a similar story. Wallet AuKRRB…L7sN bought UNC and ASTEROID after each token had already pumped, suggesting late-entry timing on Solana tickers.
A Familiar Pump.fun Cycle
Tokens launched on Pump.fun rarely survive a full trading week. Galaxy Research has argued the meme coin economy rewards bots and snipers, while retail traders absorb most of the losses.
❌ Las memecoins NO hacen ricos a los traders…
Esto es lo que dice el último informe de Galaxy Research, que resalta que los que ganan son las plataformas como Pump fun, los DEX y los bots 🫠
Industry compliance figures put Solana rug pull losses at roughly $500 million in 2024 alone.
SCAM followed the familiar template. A hype-driven launch attracted retail buyers, early holders distributed into the demand, and the chart collapsed within hours.
The token had no whitepaper, no team, and no product. Its only narrative was Musk’s recurring nickname for Sam Altman during the OpenAI trial.
Sam Altman’s existing crypto venture, Worldcoin (now rebranded as World), had no connection to SCAM. The meme coin was an unaffiliated joke trade riffing on the courtroom drama.
Whether SCAM stabilizes or fades will likely depend on how long the Musk and Altman feud dominates crypto X. For the trader behind AuKRRB…L7sN, the bill has already arrived.
The cryptocurrency industry has been suppressed by a bear market over the past several months, with numerous leading digital assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), slipping far below their 2025 record highs.
And while some have panicked, others view the current conditions as perfect for increasing their exposure at lower prices before the next bull run begins. It remains uncertain which cryptocurrencies will be the biggest winners when the market starts booming again, but we poked the AI brains of some of the most popular chatbots to check their opinion on the matter.
ETH and Which Ones?
ChatGPT’s top pick is Ethereum, describing the project as the backbone of DeFi, NFTs, and RWAs and claiming that institutional money will flow there.
“Ethereum will explode next cycle because it’s booming the default layer for institutional capital, especially as ETFs evolve and potentially include staking, turning ETH into a yield-generating asset,” it stated.
Moreover, the chatbot noted that, unlike many cryptocurrencies, Ethereum has real demand drivers and doesn’t rely entirely on hype and speculation.
ChatGPT’s second top candidate is Solana (SOL), predicting that its price may skyrocket during the next bull run because it has become “the go-to chain for retail activity, combining speed, low fees, and a smooth user experience that attracts massive liquidity.” It added that the project has become the center of meme coin and high-frequency trading, which tends to drive explosive price moves during peak hype phases.
The chatbot placed Bittensor (TAO) in third place, saying “it sits at the intersection of AI and crypto, the strongest emerging narrative in global markets.” It estimated that this unique positioning gives the asset the opportunity to chart impressive gains when the conditions improve.
What Else?
Google’s Gemini generated a very similar answer to ChatGPT. It named SOL as its best candidate, placed TAO in second position, and rounded up the top 3 with Ondo Finance (ONDO).
“Ondo is the primary bridge for tokenizing Wall Street, allowing trillions in traditional assets like US Treasuries to move onto the blockchain with full regulatory compliance. As institutional giants like BlackRock deepen their on-chain presence in 2026, Ondo captures the lion’s share of this massive capital inflow,” it claimed.
We also sought Perplexity’s take on the matter. The chatbot agreed with ChatGPT that ETH and SOL have the most upside potential, naming Chainlink (LINK) as its third-best candidate.
“LINK could pump because it’s the main oracle for crypto, so more DeFi and tokenization activity can mean more demand for LINK. It also has strong adoption signals, which makes it look like infrastructure, not just a trade,” it concluded.
