Highlights: $106M ETH sold for SOL ETH dominance hits record low Solana ecosystem gaining traction

Hifi Tech India

Crypto financial services firm Galaxy Digital appears to have exchanged over $100 million worth of holdings for SOL, as Ethereum struggles to maintain its price momentum and market share.

Blockchain analytics firm Lookonchain reported earlier today that Galaxy deposited 65,600 ETH ($106.5 million) and withdrew 752,240 SOL ($105 million) from Binance exchange during the past two weeks, citing data from Arkham.

According to Arkham, Galaxy currently holds around 55,760 ETH, worth $90.5 million, and 171,315 SOL, worth $23.91 million. Large portions of Galaxy's recent withdrawals from Binance have been moved to unmarked wallet addresses, transaction data shows.

Galaxy's apparent switch-out of ETH to SOL may reflect bearish sentiment around Ethereum, marked by a significant price correction and waning investor confidence. 

Earlier today, ETH dominance — the ratio of ETH's market cap to the total crypto market cap — fell to its lowest point in history, briefly dropping below 7%. The token's dominance has declined 43% since the start of the year, during which its market price declined 51.5%. Ether is currently trading at $1,627.

Ether's weaker performance contrasts with Bitcoin's resilience in the past day amid a U.S. tariff-induced market downturn. ETH-to-BTC price ratio is also down 48% year-to-date, according to TradingView data.

This bearish sentiment surrounding ether is also evident in institutional sell-offs, with U.S. Ethereum exchange-traded funds recording eight straight weeks of net outflows totaling over $909 million.

Ethereum's position as a dominant network in decentralized finance is also being challenged, amid its ongoing scalability challenges. Ethereum DEX volume saw a significant drop to $42.5 billion in March 2025, compared to $64.7 billion in February and $82.2 billion in January, according to DefiLlama data.

Decentralized activity appears to have migrated from Ethereum to more cost-effective alternatives like Solana and Layer-2 solutions such as Base.

Meanwhile, the Ethereum network is set to deploy its Pectra upgrade on May 7, which is its first major upgrade since Dencun's activation in March 2024. Pectra is said to be Ethereum's most significant software update yet, moving the network towards account abstraction, raising the staking limit, improving maximum blob counts to boost rollups, and more. These changes are aimed at improving the user experience.

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also recently floated a new proposal to boost the scalability of its execution layer by replacing the Ethereum Virtual Machine's bytecode with the open-source RISC-V architecture.