Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, looks beyond the coins to establish Solana as the infrastructure of what she calls “Internet capital markets”.
In an exclusive interview with Beincrypto and a presentation at the 2025 web3 festival in Hong Kong, Liu described his vision of the role of blockchain technology in the democratization of financial access.
Coins to the “all” chain “
“Solana went from the DEFI channel to the NFT channel, the game chain, the payment chain and recently the coin chain,” said Liu. “When you sum up all this, Solana is the chain of everything.”
While the pieces even led Solana’s price to an impressive summit of $ 290 in January before falling from 60% to around $ 120 today, Liu considers them as a single class of transitional active ingredients in a much wider ecosystem. “The coins are only one type of asset. There will be something else – there will always be the tulip market and the baby Beanie market. It has been going on for a very long time. This is exactly what humans do with or without blockchain,” noted Liu.
Despite price volatility, the total locked Solana value (TVL) reached a record level in April 2025, demonstrating continuous confidence of investors in the ecosystem beyond speculative assets.
The capital access crisis for the younger generations
Liu, who previously co-founded Gave.com (acquired by Coinbase in 2018) and was a financial director of Chinaco Healthcare Corporation, provides significant experience in the creation of businesses in the United States and China to its current role in Solana. His experience in traditional finance gives weight to his criticism of current capital markets.
“Fifty years ago, it took 25 hours of work to buy a part of the S&P 500. Today, it takes 195 hours,” said Liu in its presentation, stressing how capital gains have become less accessible to average workers while losses are increasingly socialized thanks to national debt.
This inaccessibility to capital markets has created anxiety among young people in the world. Liu underlined the challenges in Korea and China, where the prices of the accommodation have skyrocketed beyond what young professionals can afford without parental support.
“In Korea and China, the generation of parents has retained the increase in a large class of assets such as housing. The ability of young people to convert working hours into capital and freedom later in life has become extremely limited, “she observed. “In China, this creates enormous anxiety for families where young men are culturally planned to have an apartment before marriage, but average professional wages make it impossible without parental help.”
Blockchain as a global financial infrastructure
Liu considers that Blockchain’s main objective as creating a unified global financial infrastructure, similar to the way Internet has unified attention. “What Crypto does is to provide this unified infrastructure to unify wealth, transactions, financial boxes of five and a half people,” she said.
This infrastructure allows Liu to call “internet capital markets”, which makes the full range of financial assets available to anyone with an internet connection. It contrasts the simplicity to download a cryptographic portfolio against complex documents in traditional banking and investment systems.
For Liu, this infrastructure is particularly precious to extend access to actions and other assets which have both a fundamental value and a price discovery – commonly reserved for accredited investors even in the developed markets.
Community capitalism and ownership economy
Liu maintains that blockchain offers an alternative to traditional economic systems. “Over the past 100 years, we have come to accept that dominant property models are capitalist or communist-corporate property or state property,” she said. “What Bitcoin has proposed is that they are not the only choices.”
This has evolved into what Liu calls “community capitalism”, a term it uses to describe the economic models where value accumulates for network participants rather than shareholders or state. “Instead of universal basic income, which is essentially a social economy, the crypto offers a universal basic opportunity,” she said. This model allows the first participants in Network Building to share the increase.
Liu contrasts this with traditional platforms like Uber, where the first drivers who helped Bootstrap the network received an hourly wage but no equity. Its concept “ownership economy” refers to this more inclusive approach to capital training where contribution and property are more closely aligned.
Solana’s governance reflects this philosophy, which has recently been demonstrated in a controversial proposal to reduce inflation. Liu has actively participated in this discussion, explaining that the reduction in inflation may seem effective from a network security point of view, but could harm Solana as an active yield.
“The dynamic yield on an asset makes it an asset worse,” said Liu. “If you have an asset giving a fixed percentage per year, you price very differently from an asset giving at variable rates.”
Looking at five years in advance, Liu plans that Solana allowing an economy of property where blockchain creates new paths so that individuals convert work to capital, bringing “more inclusiveness for five billion people on the Internet on the Internet on the capital markets”.
“The final state goes to assets that have value, can also order the price and provide more inclusiveness in the world,” concluded Liu. “This is where Crypto goes.”
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