Solana Foundation president Lily Liu wrote in
“Blockchain has always been fintech,” Liu wrote, describing financialization and open capital markets as the industry’s core value propositions.
Liu, who will speak at the Consensus conference in Hong Kong next week, has been particularly dismissive of past efforts to push blockchain into gaming and broad “web3” consumer narratives, calling them intellectually lazy and overly reliant on marketing rather than real market creation. She criticizes the idea that simply putting existing applications on a blockchain (often under the banner “read, write, own”) will automatically generate value, arguing that meaningful adoption requires the creation of entirely new financial markets.
The comments come as cryptocurrency prices plunge, with Bitcoin, Ethereum and other major coins sliding amid macroeconomic uncertainty and waning speculative demand. Despite the economic downturn, institutional interest remains strong as traditional financial firms continue to explore tokenization, on-chain settlement and payments trajectories.
Liu’s comments come as other industry leaders are scaling back their visions of blockchain’s utility. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently expressed a desire to double down on Ethereum’s Layer-1 scaling roadmap, shifting attention away from the massive Layer-2-centric approach that has dominated Ethereum’s strategy in recent years. This shift reflects a doubling down of focus on decentralized ecosystems to focus on usability and consistency.
Taken together, the comments highlight a broader recalibration underway across the industry: As prices fall, industry leaders double down on the idea that the technology that underpins it all still has its uses.
Read more: From ‘Ethereum’s sidekick’ to independent star: How Vitalik Buterin’s latest pivot forces Layer 2 to grow