Everything can be tokenized! Solana Foundation Chairman: Bitcoin is gold, SOL wants to be the financial infrastructure.

From October 18 to October 22, the 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 11th Blockchain Global Summit will be held in Shanghai. Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, delivered a keynote speech at the event, presenting the vision of “Everything Can Be Tokenized” and emphasizing that the essence of blockchain is asset and financial infrastructure. She stated that Bitcoin is digital gold, and SOL aims to become financial infrastructure.

Everything can be tokenized: Vision of 500 trillion traditional assets on the blockchain

Lily Liu clearly articulated the core concept of “Everything can be tokenized” in her speech. She pointed out that traditional finance currently has an asset scale of 500 trillion, while only a small portion of that, typically through Money Market Funds, has been brought onto the chain in the past year. Currently, the amount of blockchain-native assets is approximately 4 trillion, but blockchain should not only serve this small range of assets; this should be the industry's goal.

“Everything can be tokenized” is not just a slogan, but a concrete strategic direction for Solana. Lily Liu emphasizes that Solana's vision is to tokenize all assets, including blockchain-native assets, traditional financial assets, and entirely new assets. For example, playing games and Pokémon cards are popular markets that can also be tokenized and transformed into tradable, usable, and collateralizable assets on the blockchain.

This vision of “marketization of everything” means that Solana is not only to become a trading platform for cryptocurrencies but also to become a liquidity hub for all asset classes. From real estate, artworks to game items, and loyalty points, anything of value can be tokenized on Solana and enjoy the advantages of programmability, composability, and 24/7 trading brought by blockchain.

Lily Liu particularly mentioned that the main problem faced by traditional finance is decentralization. Different countries, different banks, different enterprises, and different standards have now turned into each country, each company, and each consortium having a different standard. However, money and assets will enjoy the theory of “network effects”; the more users and more people using a network, the more valuable it becomes. The realization of “everything can be tokenized” requires a unified technological platform, which is precisely where Solana's opportunity lies.

Solana's Three Major Rankings: Application Revenue, Developer Growth, New Asset Issuance

Lily Liu disclosed the current development of Solana in her speech, showcasing Solana's market position with three “number ones.” First, Solana ranks first in application revenue across the entire industry. By 2024, the ecosystem application revenue is expected to reach 3.3 billion USD, indicating that applications on Solana are highly profitable, creating a healthy economic cycle.

Secondly, the developer community growth rate ranks first. The developer community is the core of every ecosystem, and the growth rate of developers has accelerated significantly in recent years, becoming the top-ranked developer community growth rate since last year. In 2024, it attracted 7,500 new developers, and the range of applications now exceeds 2,000.

Thirdly, the newly issued assets are also ranked first. Integrating all assets and all markets together, when it comes to newly issued assets, they are also ranked first. This shows that Solana has become the preferred issuance platform for innovative assets, whether it is meme coins, DeFi tokens, or tokenized real-world assets.

Three Main Pillars of the Solana Ecosystem:

Network Layer: Achieves over 1,000 TPS daily, with transaction fees of only 0.0005 cents, completing a Block in 400 milliseconds.

Application Layer: Over 2,000 applications, $3.3 billion in application revenue, more than 100 mobile applications.

Asset Layer: The first issuance of new assets, integrating blockchain-native, traditional finance, and emerging assets.

Lily Liu emphasized that the ecosystem has three layers, usually described as the first being the network, the second being the application platform and technology platform, and the third being the asset layer. It is essential for each layer of ecological development to be active, and an important point is that each layer can also make money. This model of “each layer making money” ensures the sustainability of the ecosystem and avoids the predicament of speculation without actual value creation.

Benchmarking Traditional Finance: Performance Beyond Visa and Nasdaq

Solana is a model-based blockchain that integrates all users, applications, assets, and use cases in one environment. Lily Liu emphasized the performance comparison in her speech: “Our vision is to exceed the performance of traditional finance. This year marks the fifth anniversary of the mainnet launch, and we can now achieve over 1,000 TPS daily, excluding the TPS from voting. Compared to Visa, which achieves 1,700 TPS, this means we are already close to two leading traditional financial platforms, Visa and Nasdaq.”

This performance comparison is not only a demonstration of technology but also a necessary foundation for the vision of “everything can be tokenized.” If the performance of the blockchain cannot support the transaction volume of traditional financial levels, then the on-chain of 500 trillion assets would only be empty talk. Solana's technical route has chosen a high-performance single-chain architecture rather than Ethereum's Layer 2 expansion solution, which allows Solana to achieve performance close to centralized systems without sacrificing decentralization.

Lily Liu also admitted, “Currently, the performance is 400 milliseconds to complete one Block, with prices skyrocketing and transaction fees only 0.0005 per minute. This is already a leading performance in the blockchain space. But we are still not satisfied. If we truly want to establish native internet financial infrastructure, we need to advance on both the technical and network levels.” This attitude of not being content with the status quo demonstrates the Solana team's seriousness about their positioning as a 'financial infrastructure'.

Solana took only four and a half years to reach a market value of 10 billion USD, while Apple took 30 years and Google required 8 years. Lily Liu explained that if we consider the time from the mainnet until now, achieving such (a feat) in just 5 years relies on what? It relies on the revenue of our network, the development of the ecosystem depends on the network making money, and also on helping our application developers to earn money, so that a stable and sustainable economic system can be formed.

Bitcoin is a dual-track strategy of gold, Solana is the infrastructure

Lily Liu concluded her speech with a clear vision for industry division of labor: “Our industry has two use cases, one is assets; the other is international financial infrastructure. We believe that Bitcoin as 'digital gold' serves as an asset, while the future financial infrastructure will be Solana.” This positioning avoids direct competition with Bitcoin and instead opts for a complementary development path.

The title of the Bitcoin white paper states “peer to peer electronic cash system” instead of “digital gold.” The vision that Bitcoin gives us is whether it is possible to build a native financial infrastructure for the internet, with blockchain being both an asset and a dream of creating financial infrastructure. Lily Liu recalls that the discussion about Bitcoin Block Size lasted for several years in 2016 and 2017, and ultimately Bitcoin decided that we are an asset; it is just about which technology in this field will serve as the technological platform to form the financial infrastructure of the internet.

This historical review reveals Solana's strategic positioning: taking over the unfinished financial infrastructure dream of Bitcoin. Lily Liu stated, what was the initial vision for Solana? It was to provide technology services for finance, to be a technical platform for online finance, the fundamental basis for online finance. How to describe it? To integrate all asset classes, to integrate all use cases in a mobile environment, that is Solana.

Lily Liu described Solana's vision through an analogy: in the future, Solana's role in finance can be compared to Netflix's role in entertainment and Amazon's role in e-commerce. This analogy clearly conveys Solana's ambition: not only to become a leader in the cryptocurrency space but also to be the infrastructure provider for the digital transformation of the entire financial industry.