Lily Liu, President of the Solana Basis, is wanting past meme cash to ascertain Solana because the infrastructure for what she calls “web capital markets.”
In an unique interview with BeInCrypto and a presentation on the 2025 Web3 Pageant in Hong Kong, Liu outlined her imaginative and prescient for blockchain know-how’s function in democratizing monetary entry.
From Meme Cash to the “Every part Chain”
“Solana has developed from being the DeFi chain to the NFT chain, the gaming chain, the fee chain, and not too long ago the meme coin chain,” Liu defined. “Once you sum all that up, Solana is the the whole lot chain.”
Whereas meme cash drove Solana’s value to a powerful $290 excessive in January earlier than falling 60% to round $120 as we speak, Liu views them as only one transient asset class in a much wider ecosystem. “Meme cash are only one sort of asset. There shall be one thing else—there’s all the time going to be the tulip market and the beanie child market. That’s been happening for a very very long time. That’s simply what people do with or with out blockchain,” Liu famous.
Regardless of value volatility, Solana’s Whole Worth Locked (TVL) reached an all-time excessive in April 2025, demonstrating continued investor confidence within the ecosystem past speculative property.
The Disaster of Capital Entry for Younger Generations
Liu, who beforehand co-founded Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase in 2018) and served as CFO of Chinaco Healthcare Company, brings vital expertise from constructing companies in each the US and China to her present function at Solana. Her background in conventional finance offers weight to her critique of present capital markets.
“Fifty years in the past, it took 25 hours of labor to purchase one share of the S&P 500. At this time, it takes 195 hours,” Liu famous in her presentation, highlighting how capital features have change into much less accessible to common staff whereas losses are more and more socialized by means of nationwide debt.
This inaccessibility to capital markets has created anxiousness amongst younger folks globally. Liu pointed to challenges in Korea and China, the place housing costs have skyrocketed past what younger professionals can afford with out parental help.
“In Korea and China, the dad and mom’ era has retained the upside of a significant asset class like housing. Younger folks’s skill to transform hours of labor into capital and freedom later in life has change into extraordinarily restricted,” she noticed. “In China, it creates enormous anxiousness for households the place younger males are culturally anticipated to personal an house earlier than marriage, but common skilled salaries make this not possible with out parental assist.”
Blockchain as World Monetary Infrastructure
Liu sees blockchain’s core objective as making a unified international monetary infrastructure, much like how the web unified consideration. “What crypto is doing is offering this unified infrastructure to unify the wealth, the transactions, the monetary coffers of 5 and a half billion folks,” she defined.
This infrastructure allows what Liu calls “web capital markets,” making the complete vary of economic property out there to anybody with an web connection. She contrasts the simplicity of downloading a crypto pockets towards the complicated paperwork of conventional banking and funding programs.
For Liu, this infrastructure is especially useful in increasing entry to equities and different property which have each elementary worth and value discovery—presently reserved primarily for accredited traders even in developed markets.
Group-Based mostly Capitalism and the Possession Economic system
Liu argues that blockchain gives an alternative choice to conventional financial programs. “Within the final 100 years, we’ve come to just accept that the dominant possession fashions are both capitalist or communist—company possession or state possession,” she defined. “What Bitcoin proposed is that these aren’t the one decisions.”
This has developed into what Liu calls “community-based capitalism,” a time period she makes use of to explain financial fashions the place worth accrues to community individuals reasonably than simply shareholders or the state. “As a substitute of common fundamental earnings, which is actually a welfare economic system, crypto proposes common fundamental alternative,” she mentioned. This mannequin permits early individuals in community constructing to share within the upside.
Liu contrasts this with conventional platforms like Uber, the place early drivers who helped bootstrap the community obtained hourly pay however no fairness upside. Her “possession economic system” idea refers to this extra inclusive method to capital formation the place contribution and possession are extra carefully aligned.
Solana’s governance displays this philosophy, which was not too long ago demonstrated in a controversial proposal to scale back inflation. Liu actively participated on this dialogue, explaining that inflation discount may appear environment friendly from a community safety perspective however would probably hurt Solana as a yield-generating asset.
“Dynamic yield on an asset makes it a worse asset,” Liu emphasised. “When you have an asset yielding a hard and fast share yearly, you value that very in a different way than an asset yielding at variable charges.”
Wanting 5 years forward, Liu envisions Solana enabling an possession economic system the place blockchain creates new pathways for people to transform labor into capital, bringing “extra inclusivity for 5 and a half billion folks on the web into capital markets.”
“The top state is transferring into property which have worth, may command value, and produce extra inclusivity around the globe,” Liu concluded. “That is the place crypto goes.”
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