Lily Liu on Solana: Striving to become the future Blockchain financial infrastructure

Organization: Golden Finance

From October 18 to October 22, 2025, the Shanghai Blockchain International Week and the 11th Global Blockchain Summit will be held in Shanghai. Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, delivered a keynote speech at the event. Lily Liu stated that every generation of internet advancement and innovation comes with special hardware and software requirements. The essence of blockchain is, firstly, assets, and secondly, financial infrastructure. Solana aims to build a technological platform for internet finance, serving as the foundational infrastructure for internet finance.

Regarding the current development situation of Solana, Lily Liu stated that Solana ranks first in terms of application revenue in the entire industry, has the highest growth rate of the developer community, and also ranks first in newly issued assets. She believes that all assets will become digital assets, “everything can be tokenized”. Solana's vision is to tokenize all assets, including blockchain-native assets, traditional financial assets, and emerging assets, transforming these asset classes into tradable, usable, and collateralizable assets.

When it comes to the development of Solana in the Chinese-speaking region, Lily Liu stated that Solana has always placed great importance on this area and has made many investments over the past two years to support the developer ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking region. Solana will continue to support the developer community in the domestic Chinese-speaking area and hopes to have more collaborations in payment, DePIN, and the AI sector.

Lily Liu emphasized that the future of the cryptocurrency industry will have two main application scenarios: one is assets, and the other is international financial infrastructure. Bitcoin, known as “digital gold,” will continue to serve as a major asset, while Solana aims to become the financial infrastructure of the future.

Jinse Finance organizes Lily Liu's speech as follows.

Host: Next, let's welcome the Chair of the Solana Foundation, Lily Liu, to deliver the keynote speech. Let's give her a warm welcome! Welcome, Lily!

Lily Liu: Good morning! I am Lily Liu, my Chinese name is Liu Yuanli.

Actually, the first time I heard about Bitcoin was when I lived in Shanghai, back in 2013. Today is my first opportunity to return to Shanghai and participate in a blockchain conference here. So I am very grateful to Mr. Xiao, who has been supporting the development of the entire industry domestically for the past decade. I also appreciate the opportunity to collaborate with HashKey and our partners to support this initiative, and to share the recent developments, future plans, and direction of Solana in Shanghai.

How many people have heard of Solana? Raise your hand, quite a few, and our community in China is also very active.

First of all, let me explain why I became interested in Bitcoin in 2013 when I heard about it in Shanghai. I had a classmate named Huabili (phonetic), who kept bringing up Bitcoin since August 2013, insisting that I must check it out. We often played poker together, and he continuously talked about Bitcoin. I felt like Bitcoin had become Huabili's (phonetic) religion. I took a look at the white paper because I originally doubted that this was a very real technology.

I opened this white paper, and it stated “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. I started to think that this is actually a very interesting concept. The internet is now an internet of information. 2014 was also the second wave of internet advancement, which can also be referred to as a mobile internet. Each generation of internet advancement and innovation comes with specific hardware and software demands.

Why is it called Web3 now? Because Web3 is a new development and innovation related to assets and the internet, and it also has its own set of hardware and software. What is the primary use of blockchain itself? There are two main uses: one is blockchain as an asset, and it is now clear what role the chain will play in 2025, which is Bitcoin. However, the title of Bitcoin's own white paper states “peer to peer electronic cash system,” not “digital gold.” The vision Bitcoin offers us is whether it is possible to build a native financial infrastructure for the internet. On one hand, blockchain is an asset, and on the other hand, there is a dream to create a financial infrastructure. At that time, I was looking at what technologies around could go in this direction and needed to go in this direction.

Remember that Bitcoin discussed Block Size for several years in 2016 and 2017. In the end, Bitcoin decided that we are an asset; it is just a matter of which technology in this field will serve as the technological platform to form the financial infrastructure of the internet.

Now let's talk about some of the problems traditional finance is facing. Of course, traditional finance is already a rich system and a very diverse market. However, what do we commonly accept as the current situation? There are so many assets and markets, but they are all fragmented. How are they fragmented? Different countries, different banks, different enterprises, different standards. Now it has become that each country, each company, and each consortium has its own standards. However, money and assets will benefit from the theory of “network aggregation”. What is the concept? A network with more users, more people using it, will also see an increase in value.

We have all seen “Experience Country” (phonetic) on the internet, discussing how strong, large, and important the network effect is. We often say “money is work business,” and we have already seen some application platforms where the network effect has a very strong impact; it will also have a very large impact in finance.

When it comes to Solana, what was the initial vision? It was to provide technical services for finance, to be a technical platform for internet finance, and to be the foundational infrastructure for internet finance. How to describe it? It aims to integrate all asset classes and all use cases in a mobile environment, and that is Solana.

Let's talk about the current situation of Solana promoting the capital market of the internet. 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. For the development of the ecosystem, each layer must be active, and it is very important that each layer can also generate income.

First, let's talk about some current data. Solana has developed very rapidly over the past few years. When it comes to the usage of Solana, the daily usage is 2-3 times higher than the combined usage of all other chains in the industry. The applications on Solana are very profitable, and currently, the applications on Solana generate the highest revenue in the entire industry. The developer community is the core of each community, and the growth rate of developers has accelerated significantly over the past few years, ranking first in developer community growth rate since last year. Integrating all assets and markets together, it also ranks first in newly issued assets.

Specific data, especially in the first quarter of 2025, the Solana ecosystem began to experience very rapid growth, with increases in the network layer, application layer, and asset layer (all showing growth).

Solana is a scalable blockchain that integrates all users, applications, assets, and use cases in one environment. Typically, in our industry, we compare the performance of this chain with that of others. Our vision is to exceed the performance of traditional finance. This year marks the fifth anniversary of our mainnet launch, and we can now achieve over 1000 TPS daily, excluding the TPS for voting. In comparison, Visa achieves 1700 TPS, which means we are now close to two leading traditional financial platforms, Visa and Nasdaq, based on our current capabilities. We have corresponding performance compared to large networks and enterprises.

The emphasis at the network layer is on continuously increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. This year and next year will see significant advancements in technology. Currently, the performance is completing a Block in 400 milliseconds, with a price leap and transaction fees of only 0.0005 per minute, which is already a relatively leading performance in the blockchain space. However, we are still not satisfied. If we are to truly establish a foundational infrastructure for native internet finance, we need to make advancements at the technical and network levels.

What kind of usage scenario is this use case for? We believe that all assets will become digital assets, “everything can be tokenized.” Traditional finance currently has an asset scale of 500 trillion, and only a small portion of that has been brought onto the chain in the past year, typically through Money Market Funds. Initially, it was not believed that the blockchain infrastructure would only serve the assets of one ecosystem or only serve blockchain-native assets. Currently, the amount of blockchain-native assets is about 4 trillion, which may have slightly decreased due to some events a couple of months ago. Now, blockchain is facing a small range of assets, which should be the industry’s goal.

If all assets are tokenized, where will these assets be used? We believe in the “marketization of everything”. Our vision is to tokenize all assets, including blockchain-native assets, traditional financial assets, and entirely new assets. For example, gaming, where Pokémon cards represent a popular market that can also be tokenized and turned into a tradable, usable, and collateralizable asset on the blockchain.

If Solana is compared to these financial companies, let's take some examples from Europe and the United States. Solana has only five years of development time, with approximately 80 million active users each month. In comparison, its partner PayPal, which has been around for 30 years, has about 400 million transactions each month. We hope to reach such a scale without having to wait 30 years.

First, let’s talk about the progress and data of the developer community, with a strong emphasis on attracting new developers. A community has two main resources: talent and capital. The requirements are the same as for any economy, any company, or any entity. In 2024, 7,500 new developers were attracted, and developers in the Solana ecosystem have also received significant economic benefits, with ecosystem application revenue reaching $3.3 billion and fundraising reaching $8.9 billion in 2024. In fact, Solana itself only raised $30 million. This figure is large, but the amount Solana itself raised is just a small part.

The scope of applications now exceeds 2000, and there is also a new mobile phone, Solana Seeker, with hundreds of mobile applications already available. Not only developers are participating in our ecosystem, but many enterprises as well, especially now with stablecoins and other use cases looking to join the Solana ecosystem.

We are currently the fastest-growing platform. Why has Solana always placed great importance on the Chinese-speaking region? It's because we started with payments. If we only talk about payments, especially in the domestic Chinese-speaking area, we are leading in this regard. With a population of 1 billion, who created the concept of “Super APP” over the past 15 years? It was domestically. The domestic payment ecosystem is very unique.

What aspects does Solana hope to focus on in the Chinese-speaking region? Over the past two years, a lot of investment has been made to support the developer ecosystem in this region, and we will continue to support the developer community here, hoping for more collaboration, especially in the areas of payment, DePIN, and AI.

In the future, Solana's position in finance can be compared to that of Netflix in entertainment and Amazon in e-commerce. With this comparison, it can be said that Solana reached a market value of 100 billion dollars the fastest, taking only four and a half years, while Apple took 30 years and Google took 8 years. If we consider the progress made in just 5 years since the mainnet launch, we believe that the next five years look very promising as well. What do we rely on? We rely on the revenue from our network; the development of the ecosystem depends on making money through the network and helping our application developers earn money, which is essential for forming a stable and sustainable economic system.

In our industry, there are two reasons for use: 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.

Thank you very much!