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

Editor | Ivan Wu said Blockchain

This article is the transcript of the speech delivered by Lily Liu, Chairwoman of the Solana Foundation, at the Shanghai Blockchain Week on October 23, 2025. In this speech, Lily reflected on her experience of first encountering Bitcoin in Shanghai over a decade ago, narrated the technological evolution from Satoshi Nakamoto's white paper to the Web3 era, and explained how blockchain has evolved from an “electronic cash system” to a new type of infrastructure for building a global financial internet. She systematically introduced Solana's development vision, technical path, and ecological expansion, showcasing Solana's leading position in the global blockchain ecosystem through data on network performance, developer community, and asset layer growth. The speech also emphasized the trend of “everything can be tokenized,” exploring the opportunities of traditional financial assets going on-chain, the integration of AI and payment tracks, and the strategic importance of the Chinese-speaking region in the new financial system. Lily believes that the future financial infrastructure will be built on an open, high-performance, low-cost blockchain as the underlying architecture, and Solana will be the core platform of this “internet financial infrastructure.”

The manuscript is based on live transcription provided by Wanxiang Blockchain. The author's views do not represent those of Wu Shuo. Readers are advised to strictly adhere to the laws and regulations of their location. Please listen to the complete content on Bilibili:

Early experiences and industry observations related to Bitcoin

Lily Liu: Actually, the first time I heard about Bitcoin was when I lived in Shanghai, back in 2013. Today is my first opportunity to return to Shanghai and participate in the Shanghai Blockchain conference, so I am very grateful to Mr. Xiao, who has been providing substantial support for the development of the entire industry in the country over the past 10 years. I also appreciate this opportunity to collaborate with HashKey and partners, to support together, and to share recent developments of Solana, as well as future plans and directions in Shanghai.

Our community in China is also very active. First, let me explain why I became interested in Bitcoin after hearing about it in Shanghai in 2013. I have a classmate named Bobby Lee, who has been bringing up Bitcoin since August 2013, telling me, “Lily, you must take a look at Bitcoin.” We often played poker together, and he kept mentioning Bitcoin. I felt like Bitcoin had become Bobby Lee's religious belief, so I decided to take a look at the white paper. I originally doubted that this was a very real technology.

I opened this white paper, which says “A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System”. I started to think that this is actually a very interesting concept. The internet is now an internet of information. 2014 was also the second wave of internet progress, and the second wave can also be described as a mobile internet. Each generation of internet advancement and innovation comes with special hardware and software demands.

Why is it called Web3 now? Because Web3 is a new development and innovation related to assets and the internet, and it also has its own set of hardware and software. What is the main use (scenario) of blockchain itself? There are two main uses: one is blockchain as an asset, and it is now very clear which chain's role it will be by 2025, which is Bitcoin. But actually, the title of Bitcoin's own white paper is “Peer to Peer Electronic Cash System,” not “digital gold.” The vision Bitcoin gives us is whether it is possible to build a native financial infrastructure for the internet. On one hand, blockchain is an asset, and on the other hand, there is a dream of creating financial infrastructure. At that time, I was looking around to see what technologies could go in this direction.

Remember the Bitcoin Block Size discussion that lasted for several years in 2016 and 2017. Ultimately, Bitcoin decided that we are an asset, but which technology in this field will serve as the technological platform to form the financial infrastructure of the internet.

Now let's talk about some problems facing traditional finance. Of course, traditional finance is already a very rich system and a very rich market. However, what have we come to accept as a common situation? There are so many assets and so many markets, but they are all fragmented. How are they fragmented? Different countries, different banks, different companies, and different standards. Now it has become that each country, each company, and each consortium has another standard. However, money and assets will benefit from the theory of network aggregation (Network effects). What is the concept? A network with more users and more people using it will increase in value.

Everyone on the internet has seen and experienced how powerful, large, and important network effects can be. We often say “Money is work business”; the network effect has already shown a very strong impact in some application platforms, and it will also have a very significant impact in finance.

Solana: From Vision to Current Status

What was Solana's initial vision? It was to provide technical services for finance, to be the technology platform for Internet finance, and to be the foundational infrastructure for Internet finance. How to describe it? It aims to integrate all asset classes and all use cases in a mobile environment, and that is Solana.

Let me talk about the current situation of Solana promoting the internet capital market. The ecosystem has three layers. It is usually described that the first is the network, the second is the application platform and technology platform, and the third is the asset layer. For the development of the ecosystem, each layer must be active, and it is very important that each layer can also generate income.

First, let's talk about some current data. Solana has developed very quickly over the past few years. When it comes to the usage of Solana, the daily usage is 2-3 times that of all other chains in the industry combined. The applications on Solana are very profitable, and currently, the applications on Solana have the highest revenue in the entire industry. The developer community is at the core of every community, and the growth rate of developers has accelerated significantly over the past few years, ranking first in developer community growth rate since last year. Integrating all assets and all markets together, when it comes to newly issued assets, it is also ranked first.

Specific data indicates that the Solana ecosystem is experiencing very rapid growth in the first quarter of 2025, with growth in the network layer, application layer, and asset layer.

The technical advantages and ecological expansion of Solana

Solana is a scalable Blockchain that integrates all users, applications, assets, and use cases in one environment. Typically, our industry compares the performance of this chain with that of other chains. Our vision is to exceed the performance of traditional finance. This year marks the fifth anniversary of our mainnet launch, and we can achieve over 1000 TPS daily, excluding voting TPS. Compared to Visa, which achieves 1700 TPS, we are now close to Visa and Nasdaq, two leading traditional financial platforms, in terms of performance, allowing us to compete with large networks and enterprises.

At the network layer, we emphasize continuously improving bandwidth and reducing latency. There will be quite a few technological advancements this year and next year. Currently, the performance is completing a Block in 400 milliseconds, with a price leap, and transaction fees are only 0.0005 per minute. This is already a relatively leading performance in the blockchain. But we are not satisfied; if we really want to establish a native Internet financial infrastructure, we need to advance at the technical and network levels.

What kind of use case is this for? We believe that all assets will become digital assets, and everything can be tokenized. Traditional finance currently has an asset scale of 500 trillion, and only a small portion of that has been brought on-chain over the past year, typically through Money Market Funds. Initially, it was not believed that the blockchain infrastructure would only serve the assets of one ecosystem or only serve blockchain-native assets. Currently, the amount of blockchain-native assets is about 40 trillion, which may have slightly decreased due to some events a couple of months ago. Now, the blockchain is facing a small range of assets, which should be the industry's goal.

If we tokenize all assets, where can these assets be used? We believe in “Everything Tokenized”; our vision is to tokenize all assets, including blockchain-native assets, traditional financial assets, and entirely new assets. For example, playing games, the Pokemon Card is a popular market that can also be tokenized and become a tradable, usable, and collateralizable asset on the blockchain.

If we compare Solana to these financial companies, let's take some examples from Europe and the United States. Solana has only five years of development time, with about 80 million active users each month. In contrast, its partner PayPal, which has been developing for 30 years, has about 400 million transactions per month. We hope to achieve such a scale without waiting 30 years.

Community progress, the importance of globalization and the Chinese-speaking region

First, let's talk about the progress and data of the developer community. We emphasize attracting new developers. A community has two main resources: talent and capital. The requirements are the same for any economy, any company, or any entity. In 2024, we attracted 7,500 new developers, and developers in the Solana ecosystem have also received significant economic benefits. By 2024, the revenue from ecosystem applications reached $3.3 billion, and fundraising reached $8.9 billion. In fact, Solana itself only raised $30 million, which is a large number, but the amount Solana raised is only a small part.

Regarding the scope of applications, we now have over 2000 applications, and there is also a new mobile app called Solana Seeker, with the mobile applications exceeding a hundred. It's not just developers participating in our ecosystem, but many enterprises as well, especially now targeting stablecoins and other use cases to join the Solana ecosystem.

We are currently the fastest-growing platform. Why has Solana always placed great importance on the Chinese-speaking region? It’s because we started with payments. If we only talk about payments, especially in the domestic Chinese-speaking area, they 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. The domestic payment ecosystem is very unique.

What does Solana hope to achieve in the Chinese-speaking region? Over the past two years, we have made many investments to support the developer ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking area, and we will continue to support the developer community here. We especially hope to have more collaboration in the fields of payment, DePIN, and AI.

In the future, Solana's position in finance can be compared to that of Netflix in entertainment and Amazon in e-commerce. From this comparison, it can be said that Solana is the fastest to reach a market value of 100 billion dollars, taking only four and a half years, while Apple took 30 years and Google needed 8 years. If it has only been 5 years since the mainnet and it has achieved such progress, we believe the next five years also look very promising. What does this rely on? It relies on the income of our network; the development of the ecosystem depends on the network making money, and it also depends on helping our application developers to earn money, so as to form a stable and sustainable healthy economic system.

There are two use cases in our industry: one is assets, and the other is international financial infrastructure. We believe that Bitcoin, as “digital gold,” serves as an asset, while the future financial infrastructure will be Solana.