Solana’s Vision: From Meme Coins to a Global Financial Infrastructure for Internet Capital Markets

Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, envisions a future for blockchain technology that transcends the transient nature of meme coins. In an exclusive interview with BeInCrypto and a presentation at the 2025 Web3 Festival in Hong Kong, Liu outlined her vision for Solana as the infrastructure for what she calls “internet capital markets,” democratizing financial access on a global scale.

“Solana has evolved from being the DeFi chain to the NFT chain, the gaming chain, the payment chain, and recently the meme coin chain,” Liu explained. “When you sum all that up, Solana is the everything chain.” While meme coins contributed to Solana’s impressive $290 high in January before falling 60% to around $120 today, Liu sees these as just one type of asset within a much broader ecosystem.

Despite the price volatility, Solana’s Total Value Locked (TVL) reached an all-time high in April 2025, demonstrating continued investor confidence in the ecosystem beyond speculative assets.

Liu brings significant experience from building businesses in both the US and China to her role at Solana. She previously co-founded Earn.com (acquired by Coinbase in 2018) and served as a CFO of Chinaco Healthcare Corporation. Her background in traditional finance gives her a unique perspective on the current state of capital markets.

“Fifty years ago, it took 25 hours of labor to buy one share of the SP 500. Today, it takes 195 hours,” Liu noted, highlighting the increasing inaccessibility of capital gains for average workers. She pointed to skyrocketing housing prices in Korea and China, making homeownership a distant dream for many young professionals without parental assistance.

This inaccessibility to capital markets has created a global anxiety among the younger generation. Liu believes the core purpose of blockchain technology is to alleviate this crisis by creating a unified global financial infrastructure. “What crypto is doing is providing this unified infrastructure to unify the wealth, the transactions, the financial coffers of five and a half billion people,” she stated.

Liu envisions these “internet capital markets” making a full range of financial assets available to anyone with an internet connection. She highlights the simplicity of downloading a crypto wallet compared to the complex paperwork of traditional banking systems.

Liu suggests that the blockchain offers an alternative economic system, one she terms “community-based capitalism.” This model allows value to accumulate to network participants rather than just shareholders or state entities. “Instead of universal basic income, which is essentially a welfare economy, crypto proposes universal basic opportunity,” she said.

This model reflects Solana’s governance, which recently demonstrated this philosophy in a controversial proposal to reduce inflation. Liu actively participated in this discussion, arguing that reducing inflation might seem efficient from a network security perspective but could potentially harm Solana as a yield-generating asset.

Looking five years ahead, Liu envisions Solana playing a vital role in creating an ownership economy. She believes blockchain technology will provide new avenues for individuals to convert labor into capital, creating more inclusivity for internet users around the world.

“The end state is moving into assets that have value, can also command price, and bring more inclusivity around the world,” Liu concluded. “This is where crypto is going.”