Solana Foundation President Lily Liu has issued a clarion call for the blockchain industry to refocus on its original purpose: finance. In a post on X, Liu stated, "Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance," positioning financialization and open capital markets as the sector's core value proposition. She explicitly rejected years of industry narratives that attempted to frame blockchain technology as a generalized replacement for the modern internet.
Liu was particularly critical of past efforts to push blockchains into gaming and broad "web3" consumer applications, labeling these pursuits as intellectually lazy and overly reliant on marketing rather than genuine market creation. She argued that the idea of simply placing existing applications on a blockchain—often under the "read, write, own" banner—does not automatically generate value. Instead, she contends that meaningful adoption requires the creation of entirely new financial markets and instruments.
The comments arrive during a significant market downturn, with Bitcoin (BTC) slipping below $70,000 and other major tokens like Ether (ETH) sliding amid macroeconomic uncertainty and fading speculative demand. Despite the price pressure, Liu highlighted that institutional interest remains robust, with traditional financial firms continuing to explore tokenization, on-chain settlement, and payment rails.
Liu's remarks align with a broader industry recalibration. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently signaled a desire to double down on Ethereum's layer-1 scaling roadmap, pulling focus from a sprawling layer-2-centric strategy. This collective shift suggests a move away from fragmented ecosystems toward a renewed focus on usability, coherence, and core financial utility.
For Solana, this financial focus leverages its core strengths of speed and low fees, which are critical for payments, trading, and decentralized finance (DeFi). The network is already seeing this direction in action, with stablecoins and tokenized assets using Solana's infrastructure to move value efficiently.
