Solana Foundation’s Liu urges refocus on finance as crypto slides and narratives narrow

Blockchains should refocus on their original purpose: finance, Solana Foundation President Lily Liu wrote on X Thursday, rejecting years of narratives that attempted to frame the technology as a generalized replacement for the modern internet.

“Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance,” Liu wrote, describing financialization and open capital markets as the sector’s core value proposition.

Liu, who will be speaking at Consensus Hong Kong next week, was particularly dismissive of past efforts to push blockchains into gaming and broad “web3” consumer narratives, calling them intellectually lazy and overly reliant on marketing rather than genuine market creation. She criticized the idea that simply placing existing applications on a blockchain, often under the banner of “read, write, own” would automatically generate value, arguing instead that meaningful adoption requires the creation of entirely new financial markets.

The comments land at a moment when crypto prices have been plunging, with bitcoin, ether and other major tokens sliding amid macroeconomic uncertainty and fading speculative demand. Despite the downturn, institutional interest remains strong, as traditional financial firms continue exploring tokenization, onchain settlement and payments rails.

Liu’s remarks also come as other industry leaders are narrowing their own visions for blockchain utility. Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin has recently signaled a desire to double down on Ethereum’s layer-1 scaling roadmap, pulling focus away from a sprawling layer-2-centric approach that has dominated Ethereum’s strategy in recent years. The shift reflects 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 underpinning all of this still has its purpose.

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