Compiled by: Golden Finance
On February 19, at the Consensus HK 2025 conference, Solana Foundation Chairman Lily Liu and Nine Box Capital co-founder Henry Sein discussed Solana's user growth in the meme coin boom, its development strategy in the multi-chain ecosystem, and its unique vision as a global financial infrastructure.
This conversation not only provides us with the latest developments in the Solana ecosystem, but also provides us with valuable inspiration for in-depth thinking about the future development direction of the cryptocurrency industry.
Golden Finance has compiled the speech content as follows for readers.
Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu and Nine Box Capital Co-founder Henry Sein
Hi everyone, I'm Henry Sein, one of the co-founders of Nine Box Capital, we are one of the crypto hedge funds regulated in Dubai. I spent 15 years in Hong Kong and I'm very happy to be back here, back home.
Today we will discuss some of the latest developments in the Solana ecosystem, the future of Solana, and its place in the market. I am very honored to discuss these topics with Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation. Welcome to Hong Kong, Lily! Thank you for coming.
Lily Liu, the president of the Solana Foundation, may be known to many people. You may not know that Lily was a member of the Stanford University rowing team and participated in the eight-person rowing competition. Rowing is very relevant to the crypto world because it teaches you an important thing - endurance, which is very necessary in our industry.
Henry Sein: Lily, I believe many people are curious about the current situation of the Solana ecosystem. We will discuss a lot of the latest developments about Solana and the broader market today. Can you share with us some of the latest developments you have seen in the Solana ecosystem?
Lily Liu：Thank you, Henry. It's great to be in Hong Kong. As you said, Solana has made a lot of progress in multiple areas. In the past, Solana has been called the DeFi chain, the NFT chain, the game chain, the stablecoin chain, and recently even the meme coin chain. As a general-purpose Layer 1 blockchain, Solana's challenge is to achieve breadth and depth in multiple different application scenarios and protocols to adapt to this evolving industry.
Henry Sein：It sounds like Solana has indeed made great progress in multiple areas. From a data perspective, many users seem to come from the meme coin ecosystem, which is also a relatively new phenomenon. What do you think of this change? Is this a natural progression?
Lily Liu：Yes, there is no doubt that meme coins have indeed brought in a large number of new users. There has always been criticism of the crypto industry that it is just a speculative market. Since Bitcoin reached $1,300 in 2013, many people have questioned crypto. The ICO era also experienced a lot of similar phenomena. People wanting to speculate on the chain is not new.
Henry Sein: So Lily, what do you think about the future development? If you look at the long term, especially from the perspective of cross-chain and multi-Layer 1 ecosystem, how do you think Solana will develop? Do you think there will be 50 Layer 1 blockchains interconnected?
Lily Liu: I don’t think there will be a market-dominant pattern like the search engine or e-commerce industry. Because in the crypto industry, the cost of launching a new blockchain is high, and the exit incentives and expected value calculations are different from traditional industries. As more chains and use cases emerge, the market will become more decentralized.
Blockchains are not just technology, they also represent communities, and communities are the key to determining the vitality of blockchains and tokens. As long as a blockchain has a community, it will not disappear easily.
Therefore, I think the future will be a multi-chain ecosystem, and Solana is unique in that its goal is to build a global financial infrastructure. The value of blockchain lies in creating a global financial infrastructure, and this is exactly Solana's mission.
Henry Sein: This is a really interesting perspective. You think that every blockchain in the future will have a focused area. Will Solana also have its own "features"?
Lily Liu: I would not regard Solana as a "segment", but as a core component of the global financial infrastructure. The ultimate goal of blockchain is to provide global liquidity and access the world's 550 million Internet users.
Solana's goal is to provide global liquidity and create explosive markets, which is not just a specific "segment", but the foundation of the entire industry.
Henry Sein: I remember that after the FTX incident, many people thought Solana was "dead", but in fact, Solana has performed quite well in the past year and a half. How do you view Solana's success? Is it the power of the community, technology, or infrastructure support?
Lily Liu: Indeed, in November and December 2022, many people were pessimistic about Solana and thought it was "dead". But from the perspective of the community, little has changed. Everyone is still building, and their beliefs are even stronger. Many people are excited after the FTX crash because they have the opportunity to continue building the ecosystem they believe in.
Henry Sein: The "rowing team" you mentioned can also bring some inspiration, especially the interest in various regions around the world. From a global perspective, are there some regions that show more interest?
Lily Liu: Yes, I think fundamentally, open source technology will eventually become a public project library. Each of us can ultimately be seen as serving all of humanity. So, open source technology is inherently global. That is to say, technology should show Chinese characteristics in China, American characteristics in the United States, German characteristics in Germany, and Indian characteristics in India. How people want to use the underlying technology should be reflected in the developer community, the application layer, and their choices. This is what it should be like.
Henry Sein: So, if you ask me, which markets are most important to cryptocurrencies? My answer remains the same: two big markets with extensive talent and capital resources - the United States and China. I wouldn't say these two markets have been very open to crypto in the past four years, after all, this is where the industry started. It's constantly changing like a tide. I think the entire industry has changed dramatically since November last year, especially the attitude of the US market towards crypto has changed 180 degrees. We are seeing the US changing the scope of discussion on every topic, especially the strategic importance of stablecoins, which will drive a lot of changes around the world.
Lily Liu: In terms of expansion that you mentioned, I think the changes in the US are definitely positive for the industry. We are now seeing a lot of discussion about stablecoins as strategic reserves, and the era of "enforcement regulation" in the crypto industry is coming to an end.
Henry Sein: From your personal perspective, what do you think is the most important development in the US in the crypto industry, especially the impact on Solana and the industry as a whole?
Lily Liu：I think there will certainly be a lot of specific legislation and issues that everyone is concerned about, but the most important change has already emerged: we are no longer simply persecuting the entire cryptocurrency industry, and no longer seeing the entire industry as an existence that must be eliminated because of some ideological differences. The previous situation was that regulators in certain countries took a comprehensive suppression attitude towards this industry, and even indirectly increased the burden on the entire industry.
Henry Sein：I am glad that this situation has passed. Next, we will see that the US policy on stablecoins will be closely integrated with strategy. From the US perspective, it is clear that the United States wants to maintain its leadership in all important technological fields, and also hopes to continue to expand the global influence of the US dollar through stablecoins. I recently saw some charts showing that there are 50 economies in the world with a CPI of more than 5%, involving about 1 billion people. So the United States may see this as a strategic opportunity to use this demand to influence long-term interest rates, which is an important goal of the Treasury Department.
Lily Liu: In addition, I know that you are also discussing the impact of the "Libra" project. Do you think Libra will have a positive or negative impact on Solana and the entire industry?
Henry Sein: I think Libra is bad for everyone, no doubt about it. I think it is a very bad situation and it is not worth discussing. However, as for the mainstream "meme coins", such as those with 20,000 to 50,000 transactions per day, are they all the same as Libra? Of course not, they are not assets that will be passed on to the next generation. Mainstream "meme coins" do not necessarily become long-term value-preserving assets.
Lily Liu: From a regulatory perspective, the entire crypto industry has experienced an extreme situation. Many technological and financial innovations have been pushed to a limit, resulting in a "suppression" of all innovations. We could have explored more innovative products, but due to the current extremely strict regulatory environment, any innovation with a little financial nature is often regarded as a violation, and even costs a lot of money to hire lawyers.
Henry Sein: I think what we need to rethink now is how to break this regulatory shackles and explore more intermediate products in the crypto economy. For example, creating a token that allows users to share the benefits of the protocol. This kind of innovation has potential in DeFi, but due to excessive regulation, many people dare not try it.
Lily Liu: In fact, the future of DeFi is very promising, especially in the Solana ecosystem. What do you think is the most exciting vertical direction of DeFi?
Henry Sein: When we discuss DeFi now, we often just trade, buy and sell one token for another. But from the original intention of DeFi, it is actually a "peer-to-peer" payment economic system. Its core is decentralized payment and transactions, which is exactly what we should pursue. But why haven't we achieved this goal yet? This is actually because we haven't made enough reforms in the infrastructure. The payment economy is the "ultimate goal" of the DeFi industry, and it is also the part that I am most excited about.
Lily Liu: The last question, as one of the largest L1 foundations in the world, what do you think is the biggest challenge as a foundation? This is a very unique role.
Henry Sein: It may be the time zone issue. There is always someone who wants to talk to you. In fact, the biggest challenge is facing the speed and breadth of technological development. Just like the Web2 era, there are all kinds of users and content needs on the Internet.
Lily Liu: So I think it is very important to find ways to stay relevant across this entire range, because this is what we mean by "financial infrastructure". Right? It also means that as an open source protocol, you need to provide accessibility and usability for all types of assets.
Henry Sein: But it's not just the scope of assets, it's also the scope of communities, and even the scope of humanity as a whole.
Lily Liu: I love that perspective. Thank you so much for joining us today to share your insights. Thank you so much, everybody.
Henry Sein: Thank you, thank you so much for your support.
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