Crypto corner: Solana’s Lily Liu sees blockchain as core to future of finance

Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, said blockchain is moving closer to becoming mainstream financial infrastructure, with stablecoins and tokenised assets playing a central role.“This is just one more step in the future that we’ve seen for quite a while, which is where a whole range of financial assets and also data are going to be natively on chain,” Liu said.

She added that blockchains turn “money into data, data into money,” enabling a shared global system that anyone with internet access can use.

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On stablecoins, Liu explained that blockchain can be understood in two main ways. “There’s blockchain as an asset, and that’s Bitcoin,” she said. The other use is blockchain as infrastructure, which supports stablecoins and other tokens. She noted, “There’s Bitcoin as the asset, and then there’s Solana, which is going to be global financial infrastructure.”Solana, which runs as open-source technology, is used by thousands of developers and millions of users worldwide. Liu said the protocol processes “more transactions every day than all of the rest of blockchains combined, and then times two.” The foundation is focusing on building stablecoin systems and moving real-world assets, such as money market funds, onto the blockchain.

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She pointed out that blockchain’s global accessibility means countries need to decide how to incorporate it into their financial systems. “The UAE here has become a global leader, one of the two global hubs of the blockchain industry, and was able to do that very quickly,” Liu said.

For the full interview, watch the accompanying video

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