Interview: Tong, PANews

Editor: Yuliya, PANews

11 years ago, Shanghai was the first stop for Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation, as she entered the crypto world. 11 years later, she returns here with deep insights and high regard for the Chinese-speaking market.

In this PANews exclusive interview, Lily Liu shares her understanding of the underlying logic of blockchain, the development trajectory of the internet, and the concept of PayFi. She explains why Solana has increased its investment in the Chinese-speaking region since 2023 and discusses how Solana is building an open financial infrastructure globally while promoting developer ecosystems and digital asset innovation.

Non-technical Background, Starting Crypto Enlightenment in Shanghai

PANews: You mentioned in your speech at Wanxiang that you have a deep connection with Shanghai. 11 years ago, you worked in Shanghai and first encountered the crypto world there. Can you tell us about that story?

Lily Liu: It was 2013, and my good friend Bobby Lee founded one of China’s earliest Bitcoin exchanges, BTCC. We are alumni and have known each other since 2012. One day while we were playing poker, he suddenly started talking to me about Bitcoin and held a speech in Shanghai, almost preaching Bitcoin as a “religion.” I was quite curious but also somewhat skeptical, wondering if Bitcoin was some sort of “money laundering tool” or an informal technology.

Bobby encouraged me to read the Bitcoin white paper. I read it several times and found that although it was not long, it proposed a very innovative technical architecture. Although I do not come from a technical background, I could see that this was a real breakthrough, not just a “tool for playing with money,” but a new direction brought about by the combination of economics and technology.

The title of the white paper is “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System,” and I found this concept very interesting. It actually proposed a new phase of the internet. Looking back at the development of the internet, we have gone through two phases: the information internet and the mobile internet, while Web3 is the “internet of assets.”

In the history of internet development, there is a rarely seen HTTP status code “402 Payment Required,” which proposed the idea of native internet payments as early as 30 years ago. However, the technology was not mature enough at that time, and people could not maintain value in the electronic world.

The fundamental innovation of blockchain is establishing a trusted ledger on the internet. From the birth of Bitcoin in 2008 to now, this innovation has developed a complete economic system. My entire understanding of the crypto world began in Shanghai.

Increasing Efforts in the Chinese-speaking Region, Optimistic About Payment Potential

PANews: During your recent communication in Shanghai, your Chinese is noticeably more fluent than two years ago in Hong Kong. Is it because you have spent a lot of time in the Chinese-speaking region over the past two years?

Lily Liu: Yes. I have lived in Beijing and Shanghai before. Improving language skills indeed requires an environment. Opportunities were limited in the past few years, but starting in 2023, I began to focus on the Chinese-speaking market.

The Chinese-speaking region is very active in terms of developers, innovation, and capital, with outstanding strength. Solana hopes to establish deep connections with the community here to promote ecosystem growth. Starting in 2023, we launched developer training, community building, incubation support, and investment programs to encourage Chinese-speaking developers to participate in the Solana ecosystem and explore the potential of SVM. These efforts are laying a solid technical and talent foundation for Solana in the Chinese-speaking region.

PANews: I know Solana is hosting various developer activities globally, including in Europe, India, and the United States. In your observations of different countries, what unique advantages do Chinese developers have compared to those from other countries?

Lily Liu: “Agility” is the most obvious characteristic. Whether in terms of development speed or execution, developers in the Chinese-speaking region can be said to be globally leading. In the entire tech industry, there are very few places that have a talent base with both depth and breadth, and the Chinese-speaking region is one of them.

Solana is essentially an open-source technology platform. We often joke that the Solana Foundation is like the “human interface of a GitHub Repo,” and the role of the foundation is to voice the open-source code because the code itself cannot speak. We attract developers, capital, and partners to jointly build Solana’s “city.”

Blockchain is like a new land, and ecosystem building is like establishing a city on that land, with developers and application founders as the builders of the city. Building an ecosystem can be simply divided into three layers: the bottom layer is the network, the middle layer is applications, and the top layer is assets. This order is important; if the network is unhealthy or unstable, the applications and asset markets above cannot sustain.

The entire internet has been open since 30 years ago, allowing anyone to connect and access information. With the addition of blockchain, the internet carries not just information but also an open asset network. I have always believed that this is a very interesting grand direction that can make international finance more equitable.

PANews: You also mentioned that Chinese developers have strong execution capabilities, but from a global perspective, in what areas do they still need to improve?

Lily Liu: The experience and talent in the payment field in China are globally leading. Over the past decade, the biggest breakthroughs in mobile have been made by Chinese Super Apps, which seamlessly integrate social and payment experiences, something that is rarely seen elsewhere. Therefore, if foreign countries want to find top talent that truly understands payment systems, user experience, and infrastructure, the Chinese-speaking region is undoubtedly the first choice.

PayFi is More Than Payments, Building Open Financial Infrastructure

PANews: You mentioned payments, and I remember you have been actively promoting the concept of PayFi.

Lily Liu: Yes, I initially did not expect this concept to gain so much attention. I started discussing this concept last year when one day I had an idea: payments are not just about sending a coin from point A to point B; the potential of blockchain goes far beyond that.

We should all be grateful to Ethereum; its vision has brought breakthroughs to the entire industry, telling us that blockchain is not just about “transferring value.” If blockchain can have native smart contracts, it becomes a development platform, an app platform, which greatly expands the application scope of blockchain, making it possible for any app to exist on the blockchain.

So, why do I refer to it as “PayFi” instead of “Payments”? Because “PayFi” is built on the foundational capability of payments, adding all the DeFi applications that smart contracts can create.

This means that users can enter a vast world covering all usage scenarios within a single wallet. The “Internet Capital Markets” we have always emphasized is this vision: there should be an asset internet on the internet. This asset internet is not a single application; it must be an open-source, open, and neutral financial infrastructure to gather the widest range of buyers and sellers, forming a huge market.

Ultimately, it can combine all asset classes and usage scenarios, allowing anyone with internet access to achieve payments or transactions through a single wallet, all within one experience. We are facing a huge market of 5.5 billion people online.

PANews: Besides PayFi, Solana has also actively promoted other tracks like DePIN. What other tracks are you particularly optimistic about or hope to strongly encourage developers to enter?

Lily Liu: If Amazon is the “Everything Store,” then Solana is the “Everything Chain.”

We do not specifically differentiate tracks. My view is that the role of a chain itself is to serve as a financial infrastructure, and this infrastructure can serve all tracks. Because regardless of the track, as long as a project has a native token, it needs liquidity, needs trading, and essentially requires universal financial infrastructure. A token is a digitalized value, and its nature and the project it belongs to are separate from the underlying technology.

Therefore, whether it is related to hardware like DePIN, pure finance, or other digital assets, we can support them as an infrastructure, and we remain neutral towards all assets and developers.

Tokenization Drives Traditional Cognitive Shifts, Development and User Experience Still Need Improvement

PANews: You also mentioned that there are currently six or seven digital asset treasury companies (DAT) in the Solana ecosystem. Will you support all these companies, or will there be some selection? What are the criteria for judgment?

Lily Liu: These companies are independent decision-making teams aiming to become core developer teams. Our foundation has always supported the builders of the entire ecosystem. In the past, our definition of “builder” was more focused on early project founders. But I believe these newly emerging enterprises also belong to our community's builders; they are a new type of ecological contributor, just different in nature from early startup teams.

Our role is to support the ecosystem; as long as they contribute to Solana, whether they are enterprises or individual developers, we will support them. They have different needs, but as long as they contribute to Solana, we will support them. In the past year or two, Wall Street's understanding, acceptance, and even support for blockchain have changed rapidly. We believe these DAT companies have the potential to become long-term important ecological enterprises, so we have established partnerships with them.

PANews: As you and these companies engage more with traditional institutions, have you noticed their attitudes towards crypto, or specifically towards Solana, gradually improving?

Lily Liu: I think in the past one to two years, the attitudes of various regions, countries, and regulatory bodies have improved significantly. I believe the core driver of this improvement is “tokenization.” This trend actually started in 2018, but like many new technologies, it was initially accompanied by a bubble, and after several rounds of market cleansing, it has truly developed steadily and become a sustainable direction.

This is similar to Gartner's technology maturity curve (Hype Cycle), which is very common. So, sometimes people criticize the slow development of blockchain, but I actually think it is developing quite quickly, depending on your perspective. Because blockchain is not an application; it is a network, a more fundamental facility. A more appropriate benchmark for Solana is not companies like Google, but foundational protocols like TCP/IP, Linux, or HTTP.

PANews: As you said, the infrastructure is improving, and applications are being built, which may also be why people feel that the growth of new users is not fast enough. From your perspective, what can be done to attract more users to Web3 and Solana?

Lily Liu: Currently, Solana has about 80 million active users globally each month, ranking among the top in the industry. But to attract more users, we need to improve in two areas: developer experience and user experience. There is still a lot of room for improvement in both areas.

As a foundation, our most direct service targets are developers. We have been thinking about how to make the developer experience simpler and easier. For example, a few years ago, we introduced the Anchor framework, and now there are many different developer tools that we are supporting.

In terms of user and enterprise experience, we are exploring whether we can create a simple API that allows any Web2 application to become a Web3 “super app” by integrating this API. This way, “any app can become a Super App.” We are thinking about how to make the integration of Solana and Web3 easier.

PANews: Finally, I want to ask you personally, as a female professional, you have been traveling globally recently, and your child is now in elementary school. How do you balance high-intensity work with family life?

Lily Liu: Actually, I am currently only doing two things: work and family. If you count taking care of myself, it’s three. I believe that in the long run, family is definitely the most important. But I do not think my work and family are in conflict; using my abilities is also setting an example for my children.

Especially since I have two daughters, I want them to see what their mother can achieve, rather than thinking they have any limitations as women. I am very grateful for the education my mother gave me; she never told me, “Because you are a woman, you have different expectations or futures.” She always told me that you have the same resources and opportunities, and because I am the youngest in the family, I can learn from my older siblings, thus having more resources and opportunities.

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