“Money That Works”: Lily Liu on Bitcoin, Solana, and Banking the Internet

In this episode of When Shift Happens, I sit down with Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, to discuss why Bitcoin and Solana together could replace traditional banking as we know it. For Liu, the equation is clear: Bitcoin is the asset; Solana is the infrastructure. 

Bitcoin serves as digital gold, a neutral benchmark of value, while Solana provides the high-speed, permissionless rails that can bank the 5.5 billion people connected to the internet but locked out of financial access.

A Contrarian Mindset

Liu’s worldview is shaped by curiosity and a willingness to challenge orthodoxy. As she recalls, many who gravitated to Bitcoin early on thrived on contrarianism: “The more I got told this is drug money and money laundering, the more I thought, I’m pretty sure you’re wrong. And one day Bitcoin will be $100,000.” 

That instinct to probe when others dismiss is central to how she approaches both finance and life. Being told she’s wrong doesn’t deter her; it energises her.

When Money Doesn’t Work

Her thesis begins with a blunt reality: most money today doesn’t work. She points to Zimbabwe, where inflation was so extreme that prices rose between the start and end of dinner. She also recalls her own banking struggles, being blocked from payments multiple times for no clear reason. 

To Liu, functional money must satisfy two conditions, which are quality and liquidity. The asset must hold value, and the system must allow that value to move. Bitcoin secures the first condition. Solana, she argues, is solving the second.

Bitcoin as Digital Gold

Bitcoin’s role, Liu insists, is as a store of value first, infrastructure second. Its slow transaction speeds don’t matter, because stability is what counts. When I read a tweet, she describes it as almost poetic but also accurate. : “Holding Bitcoin doesn’t make you rich. It makes you awake… You’re not holding Bitcoin anymore. Bitcoin is holding you.” For her, Bitcoin is about awakening to a long-term mindset and challenging conventional wisdom around finances and economics.

Solana as the Internet’s Financial Rails

Solana, by contrast, is “infrastructure for assets.” When asked to explain it to her mother, Liu puts it simply: “It’s a blockchain that allows you to use money on the internet from anywhere, with anyone, at any time.” Its real innovation is liquidity. 

By bringing assets into one programmable environment, Solana enables them to be exchanged, collateralised, or recomposed seamlessly. To capital markets veterans, this looks like a single state machine; to everyday users, it feels like financial infrastructure that finally works at internet speed.

Expanding Access to 5.5 Billion People

For Liu, the stakes go beyond efficiency. She sees Solana as unlocking economic participation for billions. With permissionless rails, anyone with an internet connection can turn time into opportunity. She recalls teenagers in India who found work in blockchain projects and transformed their families’ futures. 

This vision builds on her earlier work at Earn.com, which pioneered the idea that people could monetise minutes of their time online. “The greatest optimism is optimism about human potential,” she says, pointing to stories of 14- and 15-year-olds who leveraged crypto to gain access to global opportunities unimaginable before.

Governance, Culture, and the Endgame

Technology alone isn’t enough, because culture matters. Liu draws a sharp contrast between Web2 giants and blockchain foundations. While corporations concentrate capital and talent into a single balance sheet, Solana’s goal is to attract that density into the ecosystem itself. 

For her, ultimate success would be “dissolving the foundation” so that Solana, like Bitcoin, can run without central stewards. Yet she acknowledges the paradox: Bitcoin can afford to ossify, but infrastructure must evolve, lowering latency and supporting new products. The work never ends.

This is where governance questions loom. DAOs, she admits, are aspirational but not a panacea. Leadership still matters, not necessarily a single charismatic figure, but the basics of clarity, strategy, and purpose. 

The character of an ecosystem, she believes, often mirrors the character of its early builders. That is why cultivating culture, avoiding laziness, balancing engineering with capital markets, and keeping focus on the mission, is as important as shipping code.

Competition and Capital Markets

When I asked about competitors, Liu avoided fixating on rival chains. The real comparison, she argues, is not Solana versus Ethereum but crypto’s $3.5 trillion versus traditional finance’s $100 trillion. Money is a network business, not a zero-sum game, and the way to win is by adding utility. 

Tokenised treasuries, equities, or money market funds become more powerful on-chain because they can be instantly collateralised and borrowed against. That simple shift, which turns static assets into composable, usable collateral, represents the kind of utility that expands the pie rather than slicing it thinner. 

Beyond Finance: Questioning Orthodoxy Everywhere

What makes Liu compelling is that her contrarian streak isn’t limited to finance. In the latter part of the conversation, she discusses healthcare, particularly how conventional wisdom dismisses chronic conditions with “it’s all in your head.” 

Her response mirrors her approach to money: look beyond orthodoxy, explore alternative frameworks, even sift through conspiracy theories to see if something valuable hides beneath. She admits that questioning everything isn’t tiring for her, it’s fun. For Liu, curiosity is not a burden but a source of energy.

Banking the Internet

By the end of the episode, Liu’s framework is clear. Bitcoin is the incorruptible reserve asset that grounds the system. Solana is the permissionless infrastructure that lets value move at scale. Together, they offer a path toward money that finally works, not for a privileged few, but for the billions online who deserve access to value, opportunity, and agency. 

Whether Solana can reach its nirvana of full decentralisation remains an open question.

But Liu’s conviction is unshaken: building financial infrastructure for the internet is among the most important tasks of our time, and she’s determined to see it through.

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