Solana Foundation President Lily Liu recently declared that blockchains should abandon their consumer ambitions and return to their “original purpose: finance.” Her dismissal of gaming and Web3 consumer narratives as “intellectually lazy” sparked immediate debate across an industry already reeling from plunging token prices and fading retail enthusiasm.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: Liu is simultaneously correct about blockchain’s current reality and catastrophically narrow in her vision for its future.
The Part She Gets Right
Liu isn’t wrong that finance remains blockchain’s most defensible moat. Tokenization, 24/7 settlement, and programmable money represent genuinely superior infrastructure compared to legacy rails. Traditional finance moves slowly not because it’s stupid, but because it’s encumbered by decades of regulatory frameworks, closed systems, and geographic silos.
Blockchain cuts through that like a hot knife through butter when the use case actually requires it.
The problem with the “blockchain for everything” narrative wasn’t the ambition. It was the execution. The industry kept treating decentralization as a feature consumers would pay a premium for, rather than infrastructure they’d never think about. We built products where the blockchain was the selling point instead of the invisible rails enabling something genuinely better.
Gaming didn’t fail because it was the wrong vertical. It failed because teams shipped half-baked experiences and expected players to tolerate wallet friction, gas fees, and convoluted tokenomics just for the privilege of “true ownership.” Players don’t care about decentralization, they care about fun, fair economies, and actual utility for their digital assets.
Finance works because traders tolerate complexity for profit. That’s not vision. That’s just knowing your audience will put up with clunky UX if there’s money on the table.
Where She’s Dangerously Wrong
But here’s where Liu’s retreat becomes myopic: financialization of everything is the vision. It’s just not the version we’ve built yet.
Every digital asset—from in-game items to social engagement, creative work, and reputation—should be ownable, tradable, and liquid. The mistake wasn’t trying to bring blockchain to gaming or consumer applications. The mistake was building extractive tokenomics that enriched founders and VCs while creating zero genuine value for users.
When you can truly own your digital identity across platforms, trade gaming assets in open markets, and capture value from your creative output without platform rent-seeking, that is revolutionary. We just haven’t built the infrastructure properly yet.
“Read, write, own” wasn’t intellectually lazy. Implementing it via ponzinomics and calling it innovation? That was lazy.
Dismissing consumer applications entirely because the first wave failed is like abandoning e-commerce in 1999 because Pets.com crashed. The thesis wasn’t wrong, the timing, technology, and business models were premature.
The Real Recalibration
Liu’s pivot conveniently arrives as consumer crypto collapses and institutional money flows toward tokenized securities and stablecoins. It’s easy to call this “strategic refocusing.” It’s harder to admit it’s also damage control.
This narrative shift lets the industry quietly abandon metaverse partnerships and DePIN experiments without acknowledging capital destruction. When those projects shutter, it’ll be spun as “returning to core competencies” rather than “we built products nobody wanted.”
But there’s a deeper risk here: if blockchain leaders concede that the technology only works for finance, we’re admitting we can’t compete with Web2 on user experience. We’re retreating to the one domain where regulatory arbitrage and 24/7 markets create structural advantages traditional systems can’t easily replicate.
That’s not a vision. That’s a surrender dressed up as pragmatism.
What Actually Needs to Happen
The industry doesn’t need to choose between finance and consumer applications. It needs to stop treating blockchain as the product and start treating it as invisible infrastructure that enables genuinely superior experiences.
Finance will remain the killer app for the next few years because the ROI on improved settlement rails is measurable and institutions are finally ready to move. But the long game isn’t replacing Visa, it’s building an internet where value, ownership, and identity are native primitives, not bolt-on features controlled by platforms.
That requires financial rails robust enough to handle trillions in assets and consumer experiences good enough that users never think about the blockchain underneath.
Liu’s right that we need to build real markets, not just slap tokens on existing apps and call it innovation. But retreating entirely from consumer applications because the first attempts failed isn’t strategic, it’s a failure of imagination.
The technology that enables programmable money can also enable programmable ownership, reputation, and creative economies. We just have to build products people actually want instead of products that make us feel ideologically pure.
Blockchain’s purpose isn’t just finance. It’s building an internet where value flows as freely as information and that future is a hell of a lot bigger than better payment rails.
