Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation: The Token Supercycle is Coming
Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, wrote that funds, assets, and ownership are migrating to all-weather internet infrastructure, forming a long-term "token supercycle"; tokenization not only moves assets on-chain but also changes the assets themselves, allowing value to be issued, held, financed, and traded in a market that never closes.
She outlined four converging forces: stablecoins have proven that funds can flow globally on-chain; financial institutions are pushing assets on-chain; blockchain is beginning to meet the speed and cost requirements of real economic activities; and AI economic agents require programmable money. After convergence, any clearly defined value can be tokenized and gain wider distribution, financing, and trading channels. The original article also proposed that "distribution equals valuation."
She provided on-chain figures: in the past year, transactions of real-world assets (RWA) on Solana reached hundreds of billions of dollars, covering tokenized U.S. Treasury bonds, stocks, and private credit; during the same period, stablecoin transfers on the network exceeded $4.7 trillion. Visa uses the network for USDC merchant settlements, PayPal has moved PYUSD payments on-chain, MoneyGram provides fiat currency channels, and Western Union issues USDPT on the network.
She stated that tokenization allows more people to overcome geographical, minimum investment, and accredited investor thresholds, and enables holdings to be used as collateral or to earn interest. The on-chain stock remains far below traditional markets, but this infrastructure targets the 5.5 billion internet users worldwide. The article was originally published by CoinDesk and simultaneously reposted by the foundation.
She became the chair of the foundation in 2022 after the FTX shock, having previously founded Earn.com, which was acquired by a major exchange. In recent years, she has publicly shifted the narrative of Solana from a public chain competition to an "internet capital market" and AI payment track, stating that about 180 countries without large-scale capital markets are the next targets for issuance. The New York Stock Exchange, DTCC, and London Stock Exchange are cited as institutional samples evaluating on-chain stock trading models.
In market mechanics, buyers are asset management and payment companies that want to slice government bonds, stocks, and credit into combinable shares, while sellers are public chains and licensed institutions providing block space, stablecoin issuance, and fiat currency channels. The driving forces are the scale of stablecoins, institutional on-chain activities, and the emergence of agency economies, rather than a one-time product release. Funds are migrating from traditional custody accounts to tokenized assets that can be collateralized, split, and traded 24/7, with settlement fees and issuance rights concentrating on high-throughput chains. Beneficiaries are the settlement layers and RWA issuers that have connected with Visa, PayPal, and Western Union, while the burden falls on the old distribution networks organized by trading periods, custodians, and minimum subscription amounts.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Lily Liu has redefined Solana from a "fast chain" to an "internet capital market," starting from her 2022 leadership of the foundation, cleaning up the reputation linked to FTX, and using PayFi and DePIN to translate throughput into payment and physical networks. Her experience with Earn.com taught her to turn emails into payment buttons: first create small, settleable units, then discuss assets. She repeatedly states that Bitcoin is an asset, while Solana is infrastructure, effectively pulling the narrative of SOL out of the altcoin index and linking it to transaction fees. This runs parallel to Ethereum's path of securitization and compliant L2, but she bets on a market that never closes and is agent-callable.
Capital is directed through three pipelines. One is Visa, PayPal, and Western Union laying fiat stablecoin settlements on the same chain, forming a $4.7 trillion transfer sample; another is government bonds, stocks, and private credit achieving on-chain transactions in RWA form; and the last is treating countries without exchanges as new issuance locations. The motivation is that traditional depositary receipts are expensive and narrow, while tokenization rewrites "who can issue, who can buy, and who can distribute" simultaneously. Strategically, the distribution range determines valuation, and the 5.5 billion connected population is her denominator to outpace Wall Street's market timing.
Analogies include electronic trading replacing open outcry, stablecoin clearing post-SWIFT, and Alipay turning payments into super gateways. The NYSE, DTCC, and LSE evaluating on-chain stocks indicate that old central counterparties are beginning to quote on new tracks. The industry phase has shifted from conceptual tokenization to competing for clearing rights: whoever can simultaneously support stablecoins, RWA, and agency payments will collect tolls from the internet capital market. Memes and MEME are merely byproducts of the same high-turnover machinery.
This is a reconstruction of the industrial chain. Assets no longer need to be registered with custodians before occasionally going on-chain, but can be split, collateralized, and opened to agents from inception. The mechanism at play is the simultaneous reduction of four costs—cross-border remittance, minimum subscription, market hours, and machine calls—breaking the bundling of old intermediaries. Once reconstruction is complete, pricing power shifts from exchange seats to distribution networks that can reach wallets; on-chain stock can remain long-term lower than traditional markets as long as incremental issuance follows the new track.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
The distribution range determines asset prices.
Moving on-chain is just the beginning; changing assets is the cycle.
Machines need to settle; tracks are more expensive than exchanges.