Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu's Shanghai Speech: Everything Can Be Tokenized

Editor | WuBlockchain Ivan

This is the keynote speech delivered by Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, during Shanghai Blockchain Week 2025 on October 23.

In her talk, Lily revisits her first encounter with Bitcoin in Shanghai more than a decade ago, reflecting on the journey from Satoshi Nakamoto’s white paper to the Web3 era. She outlines how blockchain has evolved from a “peer-to-peer electronic cash system” into the foundational infrastructure for a new, globally integrated financial internet.

The speech presents a comprehensive view of Solana’s vision, technological roadmap, and ecosystem expansion — from network performance and developer participation to on-chain asset growth — illustrating Solana’s leading position within the global blockchain landscape.

Lily also highlights the accelerating trend of “tokenizing everything”, exploring opportunities in asset tokenization, the convergence of AI and payment networks, and the strategic significance of the Chinese-speaking region in the emerging financial order. She concludes that the financial infrastructure of the future will be built on open, high-performance, and low-cost blockchain networks, with Solana positioned to serve as the core platform of this new internet of finance.

This transcript was compiled and edited based on the on-site recording provided by Wanxiang Blockchain. The views expressed by the speaker do not represent those of Wu Blockchain. Readers are reminded to strictly comply with the laws and regulations of their respective jurisdictions.

Early Encounters with Bitcoin and Industry Reflections

Lily Liu: The first time I ever heard about Bitcoin was actually when I was living in Shanghai back in 2013. Today marks my first time returning to Shanghai to attend a blockchain conference, and I’m truly grateful to Mr. Xiao for his continuous support of the industry’s development in China over the past decade. I also want to thank HashKey and all our partners for the opportunity to participate and collaborate. It’s a pleasure to be here in Shanghai to share some of Solana’s recent progress, as well as our plans and direction for the future.

How many of you have heard of Solana? Please raise your hand — quite a few, I see. Our community here in China is indeed very active.

Let me start by sharing why I became interested in Bitcoin after first hearing about it in Shanghai back in 2013. One of my college alumni, Bobby Lee, kept bringing up Bitcoin around August of that year. He would always tell me, “Lily, you really need to take a look at Bitcoin.” We used to play poker together quite often, and during every game, he would talk about it endlessly. At some point, I felt like Bitcoin had almost become a kind of religion for Bobby Lee. Out of curiosity, I decided to read the white paper myself — at first, I was skeptical and wondered whether it was even a real technological breakthrough.

I opened the white paper, and right at the top it said: “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System.” I thought to myself, this is actually a fascinating concept. The internet as we know it today is essentially an internet of information. Around 2014, we entered what could be called the second wave of the internet — the era of mobile connectivity. Each generation of the internet’s evolution and innovation has brought with it distinct hardware and software requirements.

Why do we now call it Web3? Because Web3 represents a new stage of innovation that connects the internet with assets — it’s a new layer of development that also comes with its own dedicated hardware and software.

So, what are the real use cases of blockchain technology? There are two main ones. The first is blockchain as an asset — and by 2025, it’s quite clear which blockchain holds that position: Bitcoin. But if we go back to Bitcoin’s original white paper, its title is “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” not “Digital Gold.” The vision behind Bitcoin was to explore whether it was possible to build a native financial infrastructure for the internet.

In other words, blockchain serves both as an asset and as a potential foundation for a new kind of financial system. Back then, I was looking around to see what kinds of technologies might be moving — or trying to move — in that very direction.

I remember that around 2016 and 2017, the Bitcoin community spent years debating the issue of block size. In the end, Bitcoin chose to position itself primarily as an asset. That left open the question: which technology could truly serve as the platform to build the internet’s financial infrastructure?

Now, let’s talk about some of the challenges facing traditional finance today. Traditional finance is, of course, already a very mature and complex system with deep markets. But what we often take for granted as “normal” is actually quite fragmented. There are so many assets and markets, yet they are all divided — by country, by bank, by corporation, and by standard. Each nation, company, or consortium tends to operate under its own framework.

However, money and assets naturally benefit from network effects. The idea is simple: the more users and participants a network has, the greater its overall value. We’ve all seen how powerful and transformative network effects can be across the internet era — they amplify growth, adoption, and innovation. We often say “Money is work business”.And the same principle applies to finance: when financial systems interconnect and scale globally, the impact of network effects becomes even more profound.

Solana: From Vision to Reality

What was Solana’s original vision? It was to build technology in service of finance — to become the technological platform and foundational infrastructure for internet-based finance.

How can we describe this vision more concretely? Solana aims to integrate all categories of assets and all types of use cases within a mobile, internet-native environment. That, in essence, is what Solana stands for.

Let me share the current progress Solana has made in driving the development of an internet-based capital market. The Solana ecosystem can be described as having three layers. The first is the network layer, the second is the application or technology platform layer, and the third is the asset layer.

For the ecosystem to thrive, each of these layers must remain active — vibrant and dynamic. And an equally important point is that every layer must also be capable of generating sustainable economic value.

Let’s start with some data. Over the past few years, Solana has experienced extremely rapid growth. In terms of network usage, Solana’s daily transaction volume now exceeds that of all other major blockchains combined by a factor of two to three. Applications built on Solana are also highly profitable — Solana-based projects currently generate the highest aggregate revenue among all blockchain ecosystems.

The developer community has always been the core of any ecosystem, and Solana’s developer base has expanded at an accelerating pace in recent years. Since last year, Solana has ranked first in developer growth rate across the entire industry.

As for assets, Solana also leads in the issuance of new on-chain assets, reflecting its strength in integrating diverse markets and asset classes into a unified network. Data from early 2025 shows that Solana’s ecosystem entered a new phase of accelerated expansion during the first quarter, with significant growth across all three layers: the network layer, the application layer, and the asset layer.

Solana’s Technical Advantages and Ecosystem Expansion

Solana is a large-scale blockchain designed to integrate all users, applications, assets, and use cases within a unified environment. In this industry, performance comparisons among blockchains are common — but Solana’s vision goes beyond that. Our goal is to surpass the performance of traditional financial systems.

This year marks the fifth anniversary of Solana’s mainnet launch. Today, the network achieves over 1,000 transactions per second (TPS), excluding voting transactions. For comparison, Visa processes around 1,700 TPS. This means that Solana’s current performance already approaches that of leading traditional financial platforms such as Visa and Nasdaq. In other words, Solana’s network is now capable of delivering throughput and scalability comparable to those of major financial institutions and enterprise-grade systems.

At the network layer, our focus is on continuously increasing bandwidth and reducing latency. There will be significant technical advancements both this year and next. At present, Solana can finalize a block in about 400 milliseconds, with transaction fees averaging just $0.0005 per transaction — a performance level already among the most advanced in the blockchain industry.

Yet, we are not satisfied. If Solana is to truly become the native financial infrastructure of the internet, then continued innovation and optimization at both the technical and network levels are essential.

What kinds of use cases are we building for? We believe that all assets will eventually become digital assets — that everything can be tokenized. Traditional finance today manages over 500 trillion dollars in assets, yet only a very small fraction of that — mostly through money market funds — has been brought on-chain in the past year.

From the very beginning, we never believed that blockchain infrastructure should serve only one isolated ecosystem or focus solely on native crypto assets. At present, the total market value of blockchain-native assets is roughly 4 trillion dollars — though that figure dipped slightly a couple of months ago due to market events. In essence, blockchain still represents only a small segment of the global asset base, and expanding beyond that boundary should be one of the industry’s core objectives.

If all assets are to be tokenized, the next question is: where will these assets be used? We believe the answer lies in what we call “the marketization of everything.”

Our vision is to enable all forms of assets — whether blockchain-native, traditional financial instruments, or entirely new categories — to exist and function within an open digital marketplace. For example, in gaming, collectible markets such as Pokémon cards have recently gained immense popularity. These, too, can be tokenized — transformed into assets that can be traded, utilized, and even collateralized directly on the blockchain.

If we compare Solana to traditional financial companies in the West, there’s an interesting contrast. Solana has been around for only five years, yet it already has about 80 million active users each month. By comparison, PayPal — a long-established partner that has been operating for three decades — has around 400 million monthly active users.

Our goal is to reach that level of global scale and accessibility without having to wait another 30 years to get there.

Community Progress, Globalization, and the Importance of the Chinese-Speaking Region

Let me start with some updates and figures about the developer community. We place strong emphasis on attracting new developers because, in any ecosystem, there are two fundamental resources: talent and capital. Just like any economy, company, or organization, both are essential for sustained growth.

In 2024 alone, Solana attracted 7,500 new developers. These developers have also seen meaningful financial success within the Solana ecosystem. In that same year, applications built on Solana generated $3.3 billion in revenue and raised a total of $8.9 billion in funding. To put that in perspective, Solana itself raised only $30 million — meaning that the ecosystem’s growth and value creation far exceed the foundation’s own fundraising efforts.

As for the scope of applications, there are now over 2,000 active projects within the Solana ecosystem. We’ve also seen rapid growth in mobile development — our new Solana Seeker phone has already inspired the creation of more than a hundred mobile applications.

It’s not only independent developers who are participating in our ecosystem; many established enterprises are joining as well, particularly those focused on stablecoins and other practical use cases. This expanding participation reflects Solana’s growing role as a foundation for the next generation of financial and technological infrastructure.

Solana is currently the fastest-growing platform, and one of the key questions we often get is: why does Solana place such strong emphasis on the Chinese-speaking region?

The answer is simple — because this region has been at the forefront of payment innovation. If we look at payments alone, especially within mainland China and other Chinese-speaking markets, the scale is unmatched. Over the past fifteen years, the very concept of the “super app” was born here. It’s a unique and mature payment ecosystem serving over a billion people, offering valuable insights into how digital finance can operate at scale.

In the Chinese-speaking region, Solana’s focus has been clear. Over the past two years, we’ve invested significantly in supporting local developer ecosystems. We will continue to strengthen that support, with particular emphasis on payments, DePIN, and AI — areas where we see immense potential for collaboration and innovation.

In the financial world, Solana aspires to play a role comparable to what Netflix is to entertainment or Amazon is to e-commerce. To put this into perspective, Solana reached a market capitalization of $100 billion faster than almost any major tech company — just four and a half years. By comparison, Apple took thirty years to reach that milestone, and Google needed eight. Given that it has been only five years since Solana’s mainnet launch, we remain highly optimistic about the next five years of growth.

What does this progress depend on? It relies on network-generated revenue. The health of the Solana ecosystem depends not only on the network’s own profitability but also on helping application developers succeed financially. This is the foundation for building a stable, sustainable, and self-reinforcing digital economy.

In the broader blockchain industry, there are essentially two key use cases: digital assets and international financial infrastructure. Bitcoin represents the first — as digital gold — while Solana, we believe, is emerging as the foundation for the latter: the financial infrastructure of the future.

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