Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu: Users Need Decentralization Due to Cross-Border Issues
Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, stated that users care about decentralization, but not in terms of checking the Satoshi coefficient before pressing the transaction button; rather, it is because users are distributed across more than 180 jurisdictions and want maximum asset and application diversity, which can only be achieved through decentralization on a unified, high-performance, 24/7 global infrastructure.
She previously discussed this narrative in Hong Kong and elsewhere, highlighting the capital market landscape: out of approximately 195 countries globally, nearly 180 cannot access equity markets, with about 20 exchanges and 14 countries concentrating around 94% of a market capitalization of approximately $145 trillion, two-thirds of which is in the U.S., while other economies rely more on debt than equity for ownership by residents. She proposed an "Internet Capital Market": assets from anywhere can raise funds from anyone globally, priced in U.S. dollars, settled on an open track, with stablecoins serving as entry tickets and Solana as the settlement and execution layer.
She aligned this narrative with the concept of universal basic income in the AI era, introducing the idea of "universal basic ownership": anyone with a mobile phone can hold a small share of their national economy, rather than being funneled into welfare systems. She cited PayPal's PYUSD, Western Union, and other stablecoins and payment flows as examples of traditional institutions moving on-chain; she positioned Bitcoin as an asset and Solana as infrastructure.
The foundation took over and restructured after the FTX collapse, continuously portraying the network as a payment track for the AI economy and a "chain of everything," not tied to a single track. She emphasized that users want a variety of assets and applications, while the number of validating nodes is merely a means to achieve that variety. Being online in over 180 jurisdictions means that a single license and operating hours of an exchange cannot meet all demands.
In terms of market mechanisms, this is about valuing public chains through judicial fragmentation: buying a track that serves multiple countries and asset types, selling a solution where each country opens a licensed chain and connects them through bridges. Benefiting are networks that can simultaneously run payments, trading, and issuance on the same performance layer; under pressure are applications that can only serve a single regulatory sandbox while treating decentralization as a slogan. Users do not check coefficients but will leave tracks that cannot onboard new assets or settle over weekends.
Additionally, she repeatedly mentioned that capital formation is highly concentrated, production and users have already globalized, and the gap lies in ownership channels, not in consumption entry points. Decentralization is thus defined as geographical neutrality in settlement and access, rather than a ritual of governance voting.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Liu redefined decentralization from a cryptopunk metric to a market coverage metric. The Satoshi coefficient is for researchers, while the 180 jurisdictions are for product managers. The Solana Foundation needs a language that can speak to both regulators and retail after the collapse: regulators hear "infrastructure," while retail hears "the ability to trade more assets anytime." Stablecoins are positioned in the middle, serving as both a compliant entry ticket and extending U.S. dollar settlement to countries without exchange seats.
Capital flows along the settlement layer, not along slogans. The choice of which chain PYUSD and institutional stablecoins use will determine whether applications remain for user diversity. The foundation's narrative shift from public chain wars to the Internet capital market acknowledges that relying solely on ecological points cannot retain users from 180 countries; issuance, trading, and payments must all operate on the same low-latency track. Universal basic ownership is about writing tokenized equity into property rights on mobile phones, rather than as airdrops.
This contrasts with Nasdaq's time zones, the passport systems of European exchanges, and the walled gardens of various central bank digital currencies. The industry phase is characterized by performance public chains vying to become the "default capital market interface for non-U.S. users." Whoever can onboard new assets and enable weekend settlements without checking node lists will capture the diversity premium. Low coefficients may be attacked, but high coefficients with high latency will be turned off by users.
The structure shifts pricing power from licensed territories to track neutrality. Traditional markets slice liquidity and trading hours using judicial jurisdictions; she defines decentralization as the engineering result of rejecting such slicing. The mechanism is: user distribution has already globalized, but capital formation has not; if a unified ledger can simultaneously meet the asset types and operating hours of multiple jurisdictions, decentralization becomes a product feature rather than a test of faith.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
Users do not check node counts but will leave tracks that lack variety.
Decentralization sells simultaneous online access for 180 countries, not governance rituals.
When capital markets concentrate in a few exchanges, open tracks become entry points.