All assets will become digital assets, everything can be tokenized, and everything can be marketized." On October 22, Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation, said this during her keynote speech at the 2025 Shanghai Blockchain International Week.
She elaborated in her speech. Solana The grand vision - to build a new infrastructure for global financial technology and become the foundation for Internet-native finance.
01 The Essence of Blockchain: Assets and Financial Infrastructure
Lily Liu shared her connection with blockchain in her opening remarks. She first heard about Bitcoin in 2013 when she was living in Shanghai, when a fellow alumnus kept mentioning Bitcoin to her.
She opened the Bitcoin white paper and noticed the description "a peer-to-peer electronic cash system," realizing that this is a very interesting concept.
She pointed out that the current internet is an internet of information, and each generation of the internet’s advancement and innovation has special hardware and software requirements.
The essence of blockchain is, first, assets, and second, financial infrastructure.
Bitcoin primarily plays the role of an asset as "digital gold", while Solana strives to become the financial infrastructure of the future.
02 Solana’s Vision: Building the Infrastructure for Internet Finance
Lily Liu stated that Solana aims to build a technological platform for internet finance, serving as the foundational infrastructure for internet finance.
Her description is: "To integrate all asset classes, to consolidate all use cases in a mobile environment, this is Solana."
The problem faced by traditional finance is decentralization - different countries, different banks, different enterprises, different standards.
The money and assets enjoy the "network aggregation" effect; as more users use a network, its value will also increase.
The goal of Solana is to create a unified market environment where all asset classes can circulate and be used.
03 Ecological Growth: Scale exceeds the total of public chains by 2-3 times
Lily Liu shared a series of impressive data showcasing the rapid growth of the Solana ecosystem.
When it comes to the usage of Solana, its daily usage is 2-3 times higher than the combined usage of all other chains in the industry.
Applications on Solana are very profitable, and now the applications on Solana are the top earners in the entire industry.
The growth rate of the developer community has accelerated significantly in the past few years, becoming the number one in growth rate of the developer community since last year.
When it comes to newly issued assets, it is also ranked first.
In terms of data specific to 2024, Solana attracted 7,500 new developers, ecosystem application revenue reached $3.3 billion, and fundraising reached $8.9 billion.
Currently, the total number of applications in the Solana ecosystem exceeds 2000, and the newly launched Solana Seeker mobile phone already has hundreds of applications.
04 Technical Performance: Close to the Performance of Traditional Financial Giants
The Solana mainnet has been online for five years, achieving significant accomplishments in network performance.
Currently, Solana can achieve over 1000 TPS per day (excluding voting transactions), while Visa achieves 1700 TPS.
This means that the performance of Solana is approaching that of leading traditional financial platforms such as Visa and Nasdaq.
In terms of network latency, Solana achieves a block completion in 400 milliseconds, with a transaction fee of only 0.0005 dollars.
Lily Liu admitted that although this is already a relatively leading performance in the blockchain field, the team is not satisfied.
If we really want to establish the infrastructure for native internet finance, we need to continue to advance on the technical and network levels.
05 Everything Can Be Tokenized: Solana’s Asset Vision
"Everything can be tokenized" is the core idea in Lily Liu’s speech.
She stated that Solana’s vision is to achieve the tokenization of all assets, including blockchain-native assets, traditional financial assets, and emerging assets, turning these asset classes into tradable, usable, and collateralizable assets.
Traditional finance currently has an asset scale of 500 trillion, while only a small portion has been brought on-chain through money market funds in the past year.
The current scale of blockchain-native assets is approximately 4 trillion USD, which is just a small part compared to traditional financial assets.
"If we tokenize all assets, where will these assets be used? We believe it is in the ‘marketization of everything.’" Lily Liu said.
She gave the example of Pokémon cards to illustrate that even collectibles can be tokenized, becoming tradable, usable, and pledgeable assets on the blockchain.
06 Chinese-speaking Region Strategy: Emphasize Payment and Developer Ecosystem
Lily Liu emphasized that Solana has always valued the Chinese-speaking region and has invested a lot in the past two years to support the developer ecosystem in that area.
She explained that Solana places great importance on the Chinese-speaking region starting from payments.
"If we only talk about payments, especially in the Chinese-speaking regions domestically, we are leading in this aspect. With a population of 1 billion, who created the concept of ‘Super APP’ in the past 15 years? It was domestically, and the domestic payment ecosystem is very unique."
The Chinese market has over 4 million senior developers and the largest user base for internet and mobile payments in the world.
Solana will continue to support the developer community in the Chinese-speaking region and hopes for more collaboration in payments, DePIN, and the AI track.
07 Future Outlook: Solana’s Financial Blueprint
Looking ahead, Lily Liu compares Solana’s position in finance to that of Netflix in entertainment and Amazon in e-commerce.
In just 5 years since its mainnet launch, Solana has made such progress, and she believes the next five years will also be very promising.
She emphasized that the future of the crypto industry will have two main application scenarios: one is assets, and the other is international financial facilities.
Bitcoin, as "digital gold", will continue to serve as a major asset, while Solana strives to become the future financial infrastructure.
What to rely on? Rely on network income, the development of the ecosystem depends on making money through the network, and also on helping application developers to earn money, so as to form a stable and sustainable healthy economic system.
Future Outlook
Solana took only four and a half years to reach a market value of 100 billion dollars, much faster than Apple’s 30 years and Google’s 8 years.
This speed confirms Lily Liu’s belief: blockchain finance is reshaping our asset world at several times the speed of the Internet era.
Tokenization of everything is no longer a future prophecy, but a reality that is happening, and Solana is committed to being the infrastructure for this transformation.
