Better Crypto to Buy and Hold: Solana vs. BNB

Key Points

• Solana's speed and cheapness make it a competitive blockchain for many different applications.

• BNB offers benefits to those who work primarily in Binance's ecosystem for crypto trading and investing.

• This is a classic investing question of whether it's more profitable to focus or to spread out.

• 10 stocks we like better than Solana ›

Some strong investments earn their keep by mastering one confined area and rarely leave the fence; other strong investments win by being versatile enough to roam within their sector relatively freely, showing up to compete in new segments wherever and whenever opportunity blooms. Those differing dynamics are what separate the popular blockchains Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and BNB (CRYPTO: BNB) today.

If you are choosing just one of these two coins to buy and hold, there's a lot to unpack here, so let's get down to it.

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Solana aims to be highly scalable and flexible

The Solana investment thesis starts with its dirt-cheap costs and high transaction speed, because those traits enable use cases that feel normal to non‑crypto users. Solana's average transaction fee has tended to be a fraction of a cent, well below most other leading chains, and its transactions typically close within a second.

Those low fees and quick settlement are why large payment companies are testing it as a processing platform. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement process to Solana, and merchants on Shopify can enable Solana Pay, bringing on‑chain dollars to checkout flows that people already use. But processing payments efficiently is just one capability within the network's wheelhouse, which itself is quite large overall.

For instance, Solana is starting to host tokenized real‑world assets at meaningful scale. As of Sept. 30, there was $681 million in tokenized value on Solana, up by 36% from the prior 30-day period, suggesting that the chain is finding early product‑market fit for institutional investors and fintechs looking to find a home for their tokenized asset programs. That matters because tokenized assets represent durable, fiat currency-linked value on-chain, which can increase demand for blockspace and thus for the native token (Solana) over time.

So what enables Solana to be so flexible that it can compete in such dramatically different verticals? Its smart contract capabilities are one part of the story. Its decentralized finance (DeFi) ecosystem is another; it has $11.3 billion in DeFi total value locked (TVL) on its chain, and $14.2 billion in stablecoin value parked.

Those are serious sums of capital, and the presence of significant funding sources on the network attracts app developers, users, investors, and even more capital. All of these connections contribute to Solana being an appealing place to develop crypto projects in new or emerging segments, as well as in the established ones.

BNB's strengths are within a narrow field

BNB's narrative begins with the fact that it's the native token of the BNB Smart Chain, also known as the Binance Chain. As you have probably heard, Binance is the largest centralized cryptocurrency exchange by far in terms of trading volume, so BNB has a powerful backer to say the least.

Inside the Binance and the BNB Chain stack, BNB is the utility that opens doors for crypto traders and investors. Holders can use BNB to get trading‑fee discounts on the exchange, and they also use it to pay their gas fees, some of which are burned. The coin's tokenomics also feature automatic supply reduction via burning on a quarterly basis, which helps to put some upward pressure on its price over time.

The BNB Chain has $7.8 billion in TVL and $13.2 billion in stablecoins, so it isn't that much smaller than Solana across either metric. Even so, it is fair to ask where the incremental demand for the coin is supposed to come from in the next few years.

The strongest BNB utility remains inside Binance's universe and BNB Chain's own decentralized applications (dApps), which are very limited in comparison to a less-focused chain like Solana. And, while the chain does support smart contracts, its ecosystem is mostly devoted to crypto trading-adjacent dApps, which are unlikely to attract new users or new capital to the chain in the absence of the Binance exchange growing. It doesn't have much chance of capturing capital from tokenized real-world asset management either, as its regulatory compliance infrastructure is somewhat limited in comparison to its competitors.

Overall, Solana is a better buy than BNB due to its broader addressable market and demonstrated ability to compete effectively in several major growth segments simultaneously. BNB remains a decent investment in the broader context, but it may not outperform its less specialized peers.

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Alex Carchidi has positions in Solana. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Shopify, Solana, and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.