Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu: The Token Supercycle is Coming
Solana Foundation Chair Lily Liu stated that funds, assets, and ownership are migrating to all-weather internet infrastructure, forming a long-term "token supercycle"; this should not be interpreted as just a market cycle, as it will rewrite how assets are issued, held, financed, and traded.
She noted that the 5.5 billion internet users represent the next capital market demographic: equities, government bonds, real estate, private equity, gaming assets, and rights held by AI agents can all be tokenized, traded 24/7, and circulated globally as long as ownership can be verified. She described the resulting internet capital market as the largest capital market, using the term "universal basic ownership" to describe the reduction of geographical, minimum investment, and qualification barriers.
The on-chain evidence she provided includes: over $4.7 trillion in Solana stablecoin transfers in the past year; during the same period, RWA transactions reached hundreds of billions, covering tokenized U.S. Treasuries, stocks, and private credit. Visa settles USDC on this network, PayPal has migrated PYUSD payments and remittances, MoneyGram has made deposits and withdrawals, and Western Union has issued USDPT on it. The New York Stock Exchange, custodial trusts and clearing companies, and the London Stock Exchange are evaluating on-chain equity models.
Independent data overlaps with her narrative: the circulation of tokenized stocks on Solana is projected to rise from approximately $5.8 million in June 2025 to about $683 million in August 2026; in August, non-voting transactions reached a record of about 5.2 billion. At the time of publication, SOL was approximately $78. She emphasized that the current on-chain market size is still far smaller than traditional markets, but the infrastructure theoretically can reach the entire connected population.
She broke down the supercycle into three simultaneous market rewrites: who can issue, who can invest, and who can distribute. Stablecoins prove that money can be globally on-chain, institutions drive asset tokenization, high-throughput low-fee chains begin to support real economic activities, and AI agents become new buyers—earning, spending, investing, and settling, requiring programmable currency.
In terms of market mechanisms, what is bought is the order flow after removing traditional market operating hours, brokerage accounts, and qualified investor thresholds, while what is sold is exchange time slots and custody qualifications. Funds are shifting from fiat accounts and brokers to stablecoin tracks and tokenized warehouse receipts. The beneficiaries are high-performance public chains and their validators that can handle trillion-dollar stablecoin settlements; the pressured parties are traditional exchanges and central securities depositories that segment liquidity by geography and licensing. Once machine agents become buyers, trading counterparts are no longer just natural persons opening accounts.
Additionally, she compared this situation to the commodity supercycle driven by China's industrialization, emphasizing that this impact is entering from the supply, demand, and distribution sides simultaneously, rather than just from a single demand expansion.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Lily Liu has upgraded Solana's two-year PayFi slogan to an asset layer slogan. The $4.7 trillion in stablecoins is the settlement throughput, not the asset management scale; framing the transfer amount as a supercycle is using high-frequency pipelines to prove that the pipeline is already in place, and using RWA's "hundreds of billions in transactions" to imply that the pipeline is starting to accommodate real assets. The growth of tokenized stocks from nearly zero to hundreds of millions in circulation proves that the experiment is accelerating, but it also highlights the significant gap to the total market capitalization of U.S. stocks.
The capital path is first connecting fiat tracks to Solana through Visa, PayPal, and Western Union, and then allowing government bonds and private credit to overnight in token form. The foundation is not looking for just another meme coin cycle, but aims to become the default settlement layer for the internet capital market. AI agents are portrayed as incremental buyers, with the logic being that machines do not have brokerage accounts or opening bells, only programmable balances; whoever becomes the default wallet for agents will collect tolls from the machine economy.
The analogy is the replacement of electronic trading for trading floors, and the internet for information distribution. The contrast is that the New York Stock Exchange and DTCC are also working on on-chain equity, and the supercycle does not automatically equate to Solana's monopoly. The industry phase has shifted from "Is there a stablecoin on-chain?" to "Should traditional markets migrate ownership registration to a constantly online ledger?" The SOL price is still priced as a risk asset, while the narrative is priced based on infrastructure, and the two often disconnect.
The structural change is the reconstruction of the industrial chain. The mechanism is that once ownership can be programmatically invoked, issuance, custody, trading, and financing no longer need to go through the same set of intermediary sequences; stablecoins solve pricing and settlement, RWA solves the underlying assets, public chains solve matching time, and agents solve who places orders during non-trading hours. The 5.5 billion people are not already in the market; Liu directly writes the number of internet users as potential account holders—this is a penetration rate story, not a completed one.
ABAB News · Cognitive Law
- Transfer amounts prove the pipeline, not the asset management scale.
- Machines do not have opening bells; only programmable currency has buyers.
- The supercycle changes who can issue, not just who is trading coins.