Blockchains should focus on their original purpose: finance, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu wrote on X-Thursday, rejecting years of narratives that tried to frame the technology as a generalized replacement for the modern Internet.
“Blockchains have always been and will always be technology for finance,” Liu wrote, describing financialization and open capital markets as the sector’s core value proposition.
Liu, who will speak at Consensus Hong Kong next week, was particularly dismissive of previous efforts to push blockchains into games and broad “web3” consumer narratives, calling them intellectually lazy and overly reliant on marketing rather than true market creation. She criticized the idea that simply placing existing applications on a blockchain, often under the banner of “read, write, own,” would automatically create value, arguing instead that meaningful adoption requires the creation of entirely new financial markets.
The comments come at a time when crypto prices have fallen, with bitcoin, ether and other key tokens sliding amid macroeconomic uncertainty and waning speculative demand. Despite the downturn, institutional interest remains strong as traditional financial firms continue to explore tokenization, onchain settlement and payment tracking.
Liu’s remarks also come as other industry leaders are narrowing their own visions for blockchain tools. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently signaled a desire to double down on Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling roadmap, shifting focus away from a sprawling layer-2-centric approach that has dominated Ethereum’s strategy in recent years. The shift reflects a doubling down on fragmented ecosystems to focus on usability and coherence.
Taken together, the comments highlight a broader recalibration underway across the industry: As prices fall, industry leaders are doubling down that the technology that underpins it all still has a purpose.
Read more: From ‘Ethereum’s sidekick’ to independent stars: How Vitalik Buterin’s latest pivot is forcing Layer 2s to grow up
UPDATE (5 February 2026, 16:38 UTC): Editing header.
