Global Marketplace Vision
Solana Foundation President Lily Liu is thinking big.
At the recent Consensus Hong Kong 2026 event, Liu explained what her “Internet Capital Markets” vision entails.
The Solana Foundation is the non-profit organisation that drives decentralisation, growth, and security of the Solana blockchain.
The long and short of it is that Solana ideally wants to tokenise all world assets on-chain. These include everything from payments to trading, ultimately resulting in a unified, global marketplace for capital formation.
Liu believes that the democratisation of talent and capital formation is where crypto’s superpowers lie.
‘Solana in Pole Position’
Liu also believes that Solana is the only Layer-1 platform at the moment that has a “fighting chance” of being the peer-to-peer global cash system she describes.
“If Solana doesn’t do it, nobody will,” she said at Consensus Hong Kong.
It has occurred to her that rival platforms have spent 10 years debating what is patently obvious; that people want to “spend zero time and money to move money from Point A to Point B”.
“The fact that we have spent a decade overintellectualising this, talking about this on every dimension … it’s so much to sort of weed through when it’s just so obvious. If you want to move money, you want to spend as close to zero time and cost as you can.”
Her second reason for backing Solana is its developer community.
She argues that the so-called “Gen-2” blockchains that emerged after 2018 have prioritised being platforms for applications.
“You enable a global community of developers to build financial applications that would add utility to these assets,” she told the conference.
Here, too, Solana has ticked the box.
Shift to Infrastructure
Liu’s comments build on what many have noted already.
Since 2025, Solana has been deliberately moving away from its “memecoin/gaming platform” reputation to focus more on financial infrastructure.
Liu herself has openly stated that “gaming on a blockchain is not coming back”.
The shift to infrastructure has been reflected in the Solana to USD price, which enjoyed something of a bull run in early 2026.
Blockchains like Solana are becoming popular for their role as neutral settlement layers.
The appeal lies in stocks and derivatives being able to move seamlessly across platforms as standardised tokens, rather than living in silos.
In the first three months of 2026, Liu ramped up her views on blockchains being designed for financial markets.
She says the best value is delivered when crypto moves faster and reduces costs.
Attaching tokens to existing applications like those for memecoins and gaming is no longer relevant, she argues.
Ultimately, it is about practical use cases.
Mature Approach Hailed
While Liu will naturally be biased towards her own platform as the only feasible solution, she is not alone in her views about blockchain’s real purpose.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has also been very vocal about a return to crypto’s core values, usability and scalability being the biggest.
That investors are responding to these sentiments, which almost have a “time to put away childish things” tone to them, suggests crypto leaders are on the right track.