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She moved Wall Street to the blockchain - Lily Liu: Decentralization is the end of finance. At the Finternet 2025 Asia Digital Finance Summit in Hong Kong, Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, sparked a heated discussion in the audience with her words: "We are going to move the IPO to the chain. ”This is not a slogan, but a potential financial revolution - it comes from a financial heroine who walked out of Stanford and a changemaker from Wall Street to the front line of encryption. 01 From Changsha bloodline to Stanford University  Lily Liu, whose Chinese name is Liu Yuanli, is originally from Changsha, Hunan, and was born in the United States. Her family has a typical first-generation Chinese immigrant background - with Eastern family traditions and Western thinking, she has understood since she was a child that "the boundaries of identity should not limit the direction of thinking." She majored in economics and international relations at Stanford University, and then went to Harvard University to further study East Asian studies. One is the cradle of innovation in Silicon Valley, and the other is the center of global political thought—Lily’s academic route itself indicates that she will walk between technology and finance, the East and the West. 02. The first lesson she learned on Wall Street After graduation, Lily Liu’s career started not in technology, but in McKinsey’s New York and Beijing offices. This strategic consulting experience allowed her to face the logic of global capital operations for the first time: speed, decision-making, and efficiency. Later, she joined KKR (the world's top private equity fund) as an investment manager, honing her calmness and decisiveness in the jungle of capital. After that, she returned to mainland China and served as the CFO of Chinaco Healthcare Corporation, personally leading the construction of a 500-bed private hospital. It was the first time she had personally participated in a "from scratch" project in an emerging market. She later recalled: “That’s when I realized that finance is not a numbers game, it’s about building systems—if there’s something wrong with the system, money won’t flow. ”03From Earn.com to Solana: Her blockchain twist In 2015, when the crypto world was still a utopia for a few geeks, Lily Liu saw another possibility for the financial system. She co-founded Earn.com (formerly 21.co) with the Silicon Valley team, proposing the concept of "using Bitcoin rewards for completing tasks" - a pioneering platform that uses email to connect people and uses cryptocurrency to incentivize collaboration. In 2018, the company was acquired by Coinbase. That year, she officially entered the core vision of the blockchain industry. After that, she founded Anagram, a blockchain investment company, focusing on early Web3 projects. After that, she ushered in a new chapter in her career - serving as President of the Solana Foundation. 04. Taking the helm of Solana: Her core logic is “infrastructure revolution”” Under the leadership of Lily Liu, Solana's strategic logic is clear and calm: performance is the bottom line - throughput, speed, cost, are the basis for whether the financial system can expand. Decentralization is the soul – any centralized financial tool, no matter how efficient it is, is ultimately just an “old system with a new skin”. Financial applications need to be implemented - blockchain should not be about speculation, but infrastructure. Her famous quote is: “Blockchain is not metaphysics, it is just a new tool for the financial system. ”05🏦5. On-chain IPO: the beginning of the Internet capital market At the Hong Kong Finternet 2025 Summit on November 4, Lily Liu announced that Solana would promote “on-chain IPOs”—that is, allowing companies to issue native stocks directly on the Solana chain, skipping the traditional securities process. The ambition behind this is huge: no longer relying on centralized exchanges and investment banks. Use smart contracts and on-chain governance to replace complex intermediary structures. Let the global capital market be truly open, fluid and borderless. She called it an "Internet Capital Market" experiment. He also revealed that the first batch of companies will complete native equity issuance on Solana in the next few years. What is even more concerning is that she revealed that Solana has cooperated with established payment institutions such as Western Union to delve into stablecoins and cross-border payments - which means that traditional institutions and decentralized ecology are joining hands in a "peer-to-peer" manner for the first time. 06⚙️6. Her financial philosophy: Decentralization is not a slogan, but a survival logic In her speech, she mentioned two key indicators for judging stablecoins and blockchain infrastructure: “First, the performance must be able to withstand； Second, it must be decentralized. Centralized things, no matter how fast they are, are just a different way of cutting leeks. ”This sentence was widely forwarded at the Hong Kong conference. Some people say she is a technical person, others say she is an idealist, but in Lily Liu's view, decentralization is not a belief, but a risk management. 07🧭7. From Wall Street to Web3, her leadership is like light In the male-dominated encryption industry, she has never deliberately emphasized gender, but earned respect with execution and logic. She likes fast-paced meetings, decisive decisions, and strong execution. But privately, she is also constantly promoting the diversity of Solana community culture-so that developers, founders, artists, and investors can all find space on the same chain. She said: “Decentralization is not only a network structure, but also a new form of human collaboration. ”08🌌Conclusion: From Stanford to Hong Kong, from private equity to on-chain IPO, Lily Liu’s story is a journey about “reshaping finance.” She is not subverting finance, but rewriting the underlying logic of finance - liquidity is the blood, speed is the nerve, and decentralization is the soul. Maybe the future Nasdaq will not be built in New York, but on a chain called Solana. Please indicate the source when reprinting |
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