From Shanghai to the World: How Lily Liu is Reimagining Solana's Future With PayFi and Everything Chain Strategy

In a recent PANews interview, Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation, reflected on her journey from discovering Bitcoin in Shanghai over a decade ago to her current mission of building open financial infrastructure globally. Her insights reveal a cohesive vision for Solana’s evolution—one that positions the blockchain not as a single-purpose network, but as a foundational layer for an entirely reimagined digital economy centered on asset circulation and universal liquidity.

The Shanghai Awakening: How Lily Liu’s Crypto Journey Began in 2013

Lily Liu’s entry into the crypto world wasn’t through technical study or venture capital—it came through a casual conversation over poker. In 2013, while working in Shanghai, she encountered her college friend Bobby Lee, who had recently founded BTCC, one of China’s earliest Bitcoin exchanges. Lee’s passionate explanation of Bitcoin intrigued her enough to dive into the Bitcoin whitepaper.

What struck Lily Liu most wasn’t the technology itself, but the conceptual breakthrough. Though she comes from a non-technical background, she recognized that Satoshi Nakamoto’s “Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash” represented something far more profound than a payment system. “I saw this was a real breakthrough,” she reflects, “not just a tool for playing with money, but a new direction brought about by the combination of economics and technology.”

This realization would shape her entire approach to blockchain infrastructure. Unlike many early adopters who focused narrowly on payments or speculation, Lily Liu’s foundational understanding positioned her to recognize blockchain’s role in the broader evolution of the internet itself.

Recognizing the Chinese Developer Advantage: Why Solana Doubled Down on the Chinese-Speaking Ecosystem

Since 2023, Solana has significantly intensified its focus on the Chinese-speaking market—a shift directly tied to Lily Liu’s conviction about regional talent density. During her recent time in Shanghai, her markedly improved Mandarin fluency underscored a personal commitment that mirrors the foundation’s strategic investment.

When asked what sets Chinese developers apart from their global counterparts, Lily Liu pointed to a single defining characteristic: execution speed. “Whether it’s development speed or execution, developers in the Chinese-speaking region are arguably among the world’s best,” she notes. This isn’t casual observation—it’s rooted in concrete ecosystem experience. The Chinese-speaking region has produced some of the world’s most sophisticated mobile payment infrastructure, with Super Apps integrating social interaction and commerce in ways that remain nearly unmatched elsewhere.

Recognizing this advantage, Solana has launched developer training programs, ecosystem incubation, community building initiatives, and direct investment to encourage participation in the Solana ecosystem and exploration of the SVM (Solana Virtual Machine). The goal is ambitious: establish Solana not just as a technical platform, but as the preferred network for developers who understand both speed and scale.

Beyond Payments: Lily Liu’s PayFi Vision Redefines Financial Infrastructure

When Lily Liu introduced the concept of “PayFi,” it initially seemed like a marketing refinement—payments rebrand. But her clarification reveals a fundamentally different philosophy. PayFi isn’t merely about transferring value from point A to B; it’s about creating an entirely new layer of possibility atop basic payment functionality.

The concept emerged from a recognition that Ethereum had already proven blockchains could do far more than transfer value. With smart contracts, blockchains become application platforms. PayFi builds on this insight: it encompasses not just payments, but all DeFi applications—lending, trading, derivatives, and more—that smart contracts enable. The vision is a unified digital wallet experience where users access an entire ecosystem of financial services through a single interface.

This reframing reflects a deeper principle: financial infrastructure should be open, neutral, and accessible to anyone with internet access. Lily Liu frames this as the “Internet Capital Markets”—an asset-native internet layer that brings together the widest possible range of buyers, sellers, and use cases. With 5.5 billion people online globally, the addressable market for such infrastructure is genuinely massive.

Everything Chain: Solana’s Philosophy of Radical Infrastructure Neutrality

Perhaps the most revealing statement Lily Liu made concerns Solana’s strategic positioning. If Amazon dominates retail as the “Everything Store,” Solana aspires to be the “Everything Chain”—an infrastructure layer that doesn’t favor specific sectors or use cases, but serves them all.

This philosophy directly challenges the industry tendency to focus on specific verticals (DeFi, NFTs, gaming, etc.). Lily Liu’s view is simpler and more powerful: every project with an initial token, regardless of sector, needs liquidity and trading capabilities. Hardware-related DePIN projects need the same fundamental financial infrastructure as pure finance or digital assets. Therefore, Solana’s role is to remain technology-neutral, supporting all assets and developers equally.

This neutrality extends to emerging ecosystem contributors. The rise of Digital Asset Treasury (DAT) companies—which manage on-chain treasuries and tokenomics for projects—represents a new class of ecosystem builder. Rather than selecting winners, Solana’s foundation supports all of them, recognizing that diversity of tools and approaches strengthens the entire network.

Tokenization as the Catalyst: How Traditional Institutions Are Reconsidering Blockchain

One of Lily Liu’s most insightful observations concerns the dramatic shift in how Wall Street and traditional institutions view blockchain and cryptocurrency. Over the past one to two years, she notes, attitudes across regions, countries, and regulatory bodies have visibly improved.

The core driver, she argues, is tokenization—the trend of representing real-world assets and financial instruments as tokens on-chain. Though this trend began around 2018, it followed the typical adoption curve: initial enthusiasm, inevitable bubble, market testing, and eventually sustainable growth. Importantly, Lily Liu frames blockchain development as accelerating, not stalling, by comparing it not to tech companies like Google but to foundational infrastructure like TCP/IP, Linux, or HTTP—protocols that took decades to reach ubiquity but fundamentally transformed computing.

Tokenization is breaking through outdated skepticism by solving tangible problems: settlements become faster, costs drop, and access expands. Traditional institutions aren’t embracing blockchain as a speculative asset class; they’re adopting it as infrastructure.

Developer and User Experience: The Real Frontiers for Growth

Despite Solana’s already impressive 80 million monthly active users globally, Lily Liu is candid about what remains undone. To attract the next wave of users, she emphasizes two critical improvements: developer experience and user experience.

On the developer side, Solana has invested heavily in tools and frameworks—the Anchor framework being a marquee example—but the foundation remains committed to continuous improvement. The vision includes simplifying how traditional Web2 applications integrate with Web3; the dream is an API so straightforward that “any app can become a super app.”

On the user side, the challenge is equally fundamental: most Web2 users have no exposure to blockchain wallets, token economics, or decentralized finance. Solana is exploring ways to abstract away this complexity, making the transition from Web2 to Web3 as frictionless as possible.

These improvements won’t arrive overnight. But Lily Liu’s framing suggests the work is methodical and grounded—not hype, but infrastructure building.

Balancing Mission and Family: A Personal Reflection on Leadership and Legacy

In a closing moment of candor, Lily Liu was asked how she balances a demanding global role with a young family—her daughters are now in elementary school. Her answer transcends typical work-life balance advice.

She doesn’t frame work and family as competing priorities. Instead, she views her professional achievements as a direct investment in her children’s self-concept. “I want them to see what their mother can achieve, rather than feeling that they are limited by being a woman,” she reflects. Her own mother had modeled this perspective, never allowing gender to define expectations or opportunities.

This personal philosophy mirrors her professional ethos: remove artificial barriers, provide access to tools and opportunity, and let capability speak for itself. Whether applied to daughters or developers, Lily Liu’s approach is consistent—infrastructure and example, not restriction.

The Broader Vision: Lily Liu’s Roadmap for a More Equitable Financial Internet

Taken together, Lily Liu’s observations paint a coherent picture. Blockchain isn’t just a technology—it’s the foundation for a fundamentally more equitable global financial system. By making payments universal, finance programmable, and asset ownership transparent, blockchain creates the conditions for broader economic participation.

Solana’s role, in this vision, is to be the fastest, most reliable, most developer-friendly platform for building that infrastructure. Lily Liu’s personal journey—from Shanghai poker conversation to global foundation leadership—serves as both proof and parable: good ideas, combined with execution speed and commitment to open systems, create opportunities at scale.

The “Everything Chain” isn’t about dominance; it’s about removing the walls that gatekeepers have long maintained around finance. If Lily Liu’s vision materializes, the next eleven years in crypto will look markedly different from the first eleven.