Solana (CRYPTO: SOL) and Ethereum (CRYPTO: ETH) are two of the largest and most popular cryptocurrencies for casual investors and professionals alike. But there are big differences in the narratives surrounding each of these currencies.

And while that doesn't necessarily guarantee that they'll actually perform differently over the long term, it's still helpful to appreciate what the full-time investors are saying and why. Let's take a look at each and analyze why sentiment is the way that it is so that you can separate the chatter from the valuable information more easily.

Hopes for Solana are soaring, and for good reason

With Solana's price soaring by 170% over the last 12 months, it's no surprise to anyone that cryptocurrency investors are incredibly bullish about the future of the coin.

On Jan. 19, the coin reached its highest price ever at nearly $296, which corresponds to a total market cap of $140 billion. But even that figure doesn't quite capture the budding euphoria that the investor community is expressing regarding the chain's potential to be a hub for artificial intelligence coins, meme coins, decentralized finance, art instantiated as non-fungible tokens, and other projects. Even the incoming president and his wife have launched official meme coins on Solana, and more celebrity figures putting their namesakes into a coin is thought to be all but guaranteed.

Furthermore, the Securities and Exchange Commission is set to decide whether to approve a Solana exchange-traded fund (ETF) by March of this year. Multiple potential issuers have filed the paperwork already, and with the election of what crypto investors perceive to be a crypto-friendly administration in the U.S., there's widespread optimism about a potential approval and its (assumed) beneficial price impact.

Still, there are many areas of consternation that potential buyers should know about, which are expressed even among Solana diehards.

Newly launched coins are often considered to be outright scams until proven otherwise. And, as shown by the network congestion on Jan. 19 that prevented people from completing transactions or in many cases even checking their account balances, there's still a lot of work to do when it comes to building up the network's throughput capacity.

Ethereum's underperformance is starting to cause evangelists to crack

Unlike Solana, the prevailing sentiment around Ethereum is one of uncertainty, hesitation, and in some cases, outright pessimism.

Over the last 12 months, the coin's price rose by 28%, meaning that it outperformed the stock market's gain of around 24% in the same period -- but still made investors feel as though they'd missed out on Solana's tremendous gains. Despite the approval of an Ethereum ETF last year, consistent inflows to the chain have been lacking.