Bitcoin (CRYPTO: BTC), the world's most valuable cryptocurrency, has lost nearly 50% of its value since reaching its all-time high of over $126,000 last October. That pullback was caused by elevated interest rates, which drove investors toward more conservative investments, leveraged liquidations, and a lack of new near-term catalysts.

Bitcoin could still have a bright future, but it might be smarter to accumulate some smaller altcoins with more upside potential as the bulls look the other way. One of those altcoins is Solana (CRYPTO: SOL), which lost nearly 60% of its value over the past six months.

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Unlike Bitcoin, which is still mined with the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus mechanism, Solana is a proof-of-stake (PoS) token that can't be mined. That makes Solana more similar to Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH), the PoS blockchain leader, than Bitcoin.

Like Ethereum, Solana supports staking (locking up tokens to earn interest-like rewards) and smart contracts (for developing decentralized applications and other tokens). However, Solana's native Layer 1 (L1) blockchain can achieve real-world speeds of 2,000 to 5,000 transactions per second (TPS), while Ethereum's L1 blockchain tops out at about 30 TPS.

Solana achieves those blazing speeds by integrating its own proof-of-history (PoH) mechanism, which timestamps them before they're validated, into its PoS blockchain. Solana's speed drew in 17,708 active developers at the end of 2025, making it the second-largest blockchain-based developer platform after Ethereum, which served 31,869 developers.

Its speed makes it a useful platform for settling payments. Visa uses it to settle stablecoin payments, while Shopify relies on Solana Pay to handle its cryptocurrency payments. Those real-world applications make Solana more useful than other altcoins. Solana's first spot price exchange-traded funds (ETFs) with staking features -- which should attract more attention from institutional investors -- were also approved last year. It even launched two Android phones, the Saga and the Seeker, over the past two years.

Solana has a circulating supply of 572 million tokens with no supply limit, so it can't be valued by its scarcity in the same way as Bitcoin, which has a supply cap of 21 million tokens. Instead, investors value it by the rapid growth of its developer ecosystem and its enterprise partnerships.

Solana, with a market cap of $48 billion, is much smaller than Bitcoin, valued at $1.3 trillion, or Ether, worth $240 billion. If interest rates decline, the macro environment stabilizes, and the crypto market heats up again, more investors could flock toward the smaller altcoins with more growth potential -- like Solana -- instead of blue chip tokens like Bitcoin and Ether. Its new ETFs could accelerate that shift by drawing in more institutional investors. While Bitcoin still has plenty of upside potential, I wouldn't be surprised if Solana bounces back with bigger gains this year.

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Leo Sun has no position in any of the stocks mentioned. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends Bitcoin, Ethereum, Shopify, Solana, and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.

Forget Bitcoin: This Crypto Is the Smarter Buy Right Now was originally published by The Motley Fool