ETH vs SOL: The DCA Backtest
The identical plan — $100 on the first trading day of each month — run on both assets over their shared history (Apr 2020 → Oct 2026, $7,900 invested each). Every number below is computed from real daily closes; nothing is annualized away or cherry-picked.
Verdict on this window: $7,900 invested into SOL grew to $115,282, versus $16,602 in ETH. Different start dates shuffle this result — the rolling analysis below shows how often.
The same $100/month, side by side
Both positions month by month across the shared window: the dashed line is cash paid in ($7,900 total), the two curves are what ETH and SOL were worth along the way. Where the curves separate is where the decade's story lives.
Does the winner depend on when you started?
One full-window result can mislead — maybe the winner just had a better final year. So we ran the head-to-head across EVERY possible 5-year start month in the shared history:
Side-by-side numbers
Data through Oct 2026, refreshed daily.
The incumbent smart-contract chain versus the challenger
This is crypto's classic incumbent-vs-challenger trade, and the shared window since 2020 contains Solana's entire violent arc — the 220x run, the FTX-adjacent −96% collapse, the recovery. That path is why SOL dominates the best-window column while also owning the ugliest drawdowns; ETH's curve is the calmer, older platform compounding through the same cycles.
The honest framing: SOL's backtest starts near its all-time lows and rides a survival story that was genuinely in doubt in 2022 — survivorship in a single chart. A schedule averaged through that chaos better than any entry-timing could, but the width between these two curves is a live measure of how much extra risk the challenger side of this trade still carries.
FAQ
On the shared window measured here, SOL finished ahead (ETH: +110% vs SOL: +1359% on identical monthly buys). "Better" is window-dependent — the rolling head-to-head above tells you how stable that verdict was. Past performance doesn't predict the future; this page tells you what happened, not what will.
Yes, and if the pair is highly correlated the blend will behave like either one alone — check how similar the two curves above are before assuming a split adds diversification. Our portfolio calculator lets you backtest any weighting of the two on the same real data.
Real dividend- and split-adjusted daily closes for ETH and SOL, compared strictly over their shared history (Apr 2020 → Oct 2026), refreshed daily and validated for gaps and staleness. Fees, spreads and taxes are not modelled — see the methodology page.
Run the plan on a real exchange
Five exchanges where DCA — and tokenized stocks & ETFs — actually work, each with a real discount. Pick one, copy the code, trade cheaper.
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