According to CoinDesk, Ether's market value experienced a significant increase of over $70 billion on Monday, almost equaling the total market value of Solana (SOL), which stands at around $80 billion. Market analysts predict that the gap between Ether (ETH) and its competitors, such as SOL, will continue to expand in the upcoming months.

In December, a crypto observer suggested that the market capitalization of Solana's SOL token could surpass that of Ethereum's Ether during the next bullish cycle. However, this week's market performance demonstrated the enormity of this task. Ether's price soared by over 19% on Monday, adding $70 billion to its market cap, bringing the total to $439 billion, as per data from TradingView. This increase is nearly 90% of SOL's market value in a single day.

The surge in Ether's value is attributed to renewed optimism about the potential approval of a spot Ether exchange-traded fund (ETF) in the U.S. Analysts believe that the gap between Ether and its rivals, such as SOL, will widen in the coming months as a potential spot ETF launch could lead to mainstream institutional adoption of the token. So far, only Bitcoin has enjoyed this privilege.

As of the time of reporting, Ether was the world's second-largest digital asset, with a market cap of $453 billion, surpassed only by Bitcoin's $1.38 trillion. Solana, on the other hand, ranked fifth with a market value of $82 billion.

Ilan Solot, co-head of digital assets at Marex Solutions, expressed a highly optimistic view of Ether's near-term outlook. He highlighted factors such as the ETF announcement, underweight Ether markets, a significant portion of Ether liquidity locked in staking, and a favorable macro backdrop.

Since its launch in 2015, Ethereum has led the world in smart contract blockchain, powering over 4,000 decentralized applications. It hosts key decentralized finance protocols like Uniswap, AAVE, and tokenization initiatives like BlackRock's BUIDL. Ethereum has never experienced an outage like Solana.

However, there have been instances, especially during bull runs, when traders have switched to Solana to avoid Ethereum's network congestion and higher transaction costs. For example, Solana's share in global trading volume on decentralized exchanges increased earlier this year due to the meme coin frenzy, sparking discussions about SOL potentially surpassing ETH. However, given the recent speculation about the ETH ETF and price action, such talks seem premature.