Your questions answered: How to identify potential winners in digital assets (Part 1)

Given investors ultimately want to pick winners, it’s clear our How to identify potential winners series was going to garner some attention. This article addresses the key questions we received following the publication of Part 1.

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How does revenue compare to other metrics?

Is revenue king? Part 1 explores why revenue remains a critical metric when seeking to identify the next generation of digital asset winners. But revenue, while important, only tells one part of the story. Consider the early days of Facebook/Meta. At that stage, valuing the company solely on revenue would have overlooked the far more important drivers of long-term growth: user growth, and the network effects that ultimately compounded into a more than 500% return over the next decade. Focusing exclusively on financials would have missed the underlying trajectory that defined the company’s rise. In digital assets, the same principle applies. Without a thriving developer/innovator community and a growing user base, even the most promising platforms risk fading into obscurity. Part 2 of the How to identify potential winners series dives deeper into this discussion. 

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When comparing networks, how should valuation be considered?

Valuation only becomes meaningful when viewed alongside growth. A higher price-to-revenues (P/R) ratio demands stronger developer and user expansion to justify the premium. As the table below illustrates, based on current data, Solana trades at a lower P/R multiple than Ethereum while posting faster growth in both applications and users, suggesting it may offer more attractive forward-looking value on a purely fundamental basis. That said, Ethereum appears to be entering a new phase of renewed momentum, as several developments (discussed in Part 2) point to a potential rebound in its revenue profile.

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Are there parallels between picking crypto and internet winners?

Crypto adoption in 2025 strongly resembles how the internet looked in 2003. Back then, the internet had roughly 600 to 700 million¹ users, about 9 to 11% of the global population. Crypto today sits in a similar range, with an estimated 550 to 600 million² users. As with the post-dot-com period, the speculative excess has faded, revenues have reset, and the focus is shifting toward real utility. Compared to the life cycle of the internet, this is the stage in which durable companies like Amazon and Google were built, and a similar pattern is emerging in crypto as networks move beyond the ICO, NFT, and memecoin cycles.

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What market phase is Solana in?

Solana is entering a phase similar to Ethereum’s early expansion after a period of frenzy, but with a different value proposition centered on low fees and fast processing. 

• A clear shift in network activity is already underway: memecoin volume has dropped from more than 35% to under 10% in 2025, while stablecoin volume has grown nearly 150%, rising from 2.87% to almost 7% of all activity on major exchanges. 
• At the same time, Solana’s applications have generated the highest ecosystem revenue to date, reaching $4.39 billion in 2025 compared with $4.10 billion in 2024, even as speculative activity has been declining significantly. 

So, while protocol revenue has returned to late-2023 levels, integrations with Klarna, Revolut, and Western Union are positioning Solana for more sustainable growth, with stablecoins and Decentralized Physical Infrastructure Networks (DePIN), namely mobile operators onchain,  poised to strengthen these trends further.

These integrations help to quantify Solana’s addressable market in the upcoming year and beyond. Western Union³ and Revolut⁴ both generated roughly ~$4 billion in revenue in 2024, but the scale of the underlying payment flows they handle is vastly different. Western Union’s ~$135 billion⁵ in annual remittance volume provides a baseline for cross-border flows that could migrate onchain through its forthcoming Solana-based stablecoin. Revolut, however, processed over £1 trillion (~$1.3 trillion)⁶ in payments in 2024 more than 10x Western Union’s flow volume, and now supports Solana-based stablecoin transfers directly. If even 10% of Revolut’s payment activity shifts to stablecoin settlement, over $130 billion in annual flows would run through Solana, positioning it as a core settlement rail for one of the largest consumer fintech payment channels entering crypto. As such, the impact of these integrations should become visible in revenue as adoption scales in the coming months.

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What market phase is Ethereum in?

Ethereum is addressing its long-standing challenge of high costs and revenue leakage to scaling solutions (Layer 2s). After years of prioritizing external scaling solutions, the network is beginning to improve the base layer itself. Fees have fallen below one dollar in recent months, and upgrades like Fuska aim to make mainnet usage more efficient while preserving Ethereum’s security and liquidity advantages. As we examine in Part 2 of this series, developers are increasingly factoring this into their decisions and are beginning to build on Ethereum again in anticipation of these upgrades.

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What are the drivers of sustainable long-term growth to look for?

As seen across both Solana and Ethereum, the next step is to focus on the fundamentals that sustain it and give a more nuanced view of its technological maturation: builders and users, who ultimately give these networks their real economic purpose.

Just as in traditional finance, crypto investors should screen for underlying business strength before backing before backing upcoming technology platforms. Crypto investors must evaluate the health of a network’s ecosystem: the number of builders, and the growing base of users who actually use the technology, rather than simply hold the underlying assets.

Ultimately, the goal remains the same: to provide a structured, data-driven framework for identifying tomorrow’s potential winners, grounded in observable fundamentals rather than hype or speculation.

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Footnotes: 

1. Global Policy Forum. (n.d.). Internet users [Archived statistics]. Retrieved from https://archive.globalpolicy.org/component/content/article/109-tables-and-charts/27519-internet-users.html
   
   
2. Triple-A Technologies Pte. Ltd. (n.d.). Digital currency ownership data. Retrieved from https://www.triple-a.io/cryptocurrency-ownership-data
   
   
3. Business Wire. (2025, February 20). Western Union reports fourth quarter and full year 2024 results. Retrieved from https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20250204893052/en/Western-Union-Reports-Fourth-Quarter-and-Full-Year-2024-Results
   
   
4. Revolut. (n.d.). Record growth and diverse product offering drive Revolut to $1.4bn profit in 2024. Retrieved from https://www.revolut.com/pt-PT/news/record_growth_and_diverse_product_offering_drive_revolut_to_1_4bn_profit_in_2024/
   
   
5. International money transfer statistics report. (n.d.). TopMoneyCompare. Retrieved from https://www.topmoneycompare.co.uk/guides/international-money-transfer-statistics-report
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6. Rice, S. (2025, April 24). How Revolut redefined digital banking in 2024. FinTech Magazine. Retrieved from https://fintechmagazine.com/banking/how-revolut-redefined-digital-banking-in-2024