At the Consensus Hong Kong 2026 conference, a clear strategic vision for the Solana blockchain was articulated by Solana Foundation President Lily Liu. The platform is deliberately narrowing its focus, aiming to become the foundational infrastructure for the world’s future tokenized capital markets rather than a universal computing platform.

A Finance-First Philosophy

In discussions with Consensus Chairman Michael Lau, Liu emphasized that Solana’s core strength lies squarely within finance and markets. This represents a significant strategic delineation. The vision centers on creating “Internet Capital Markets”—a unified, global infrastructure where real-world assets can be tokenized on-chain. The ultimate objective is to establish a worldwide marketplace for capital formation that is accessible to all.

Liu traced the evolution from the early ICO boom to today’s more sophisticated fundraising mechanisms. She argued that this developing infrastructure should eventually empower companies globally to raise capital, not just cryptocurrency-native projects. A key tenet of this vision is the democratization of both talent and access to capital, a societal contribution Liu believes traditional financial markets often fail to deliver.

Asia: The Core Market, Not the Frontier

Contrary to being labeled an emerging frontier for crypto, Liu positioned Asia as the industry’s core market. This perspective is rooted in the region’s historical connection to Bitcoin’s origins and its current status as home to a vast base of users and developers. This strategic view is already materializing in tangible developments.

Reflecting this focus, Ondo Finance recently introduced over 200 tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs onto the Solana network. This move through its Global Markets platform establishes Ondo as the largest issuer of real-world assets (RWAs) on Solana by the number of distinct assets.

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Redefining Success Metrics

Liu advocated for a fundamental shift in how the success of blockchain networks is measured. She proposed moving the emphasis away from the valuation of governance tokens and toward revenue-based metrics. Sustainable value, in her view, must stem from genuine network and application utility, not from speculative trading.

This stance mirrors a broader industry trend pivoting away from speculative tokenomics and toward models grounded in actual use and value creation.

Underlying Technical Advancements

Supporting this strategic direction are two major technical upgrades in development. The Alpenglow consensus protocol aims to drastically reduce transaction finality times from the current 12-13 seconds to between 100 and 150 milliseconds.

Furthermore, the full release of the Firedancer validator client is scheduled for later in 2026. Test results have demonstrated processing capabilities of up to one million transactions per second—performance figures that could meet the stringent demands of institutional finance.

The coming months will reveal whether this focused strategy on institutional financial applications translates into measurable ecosystem growth. With recent RWA integrations and the forthcoming technical enhancements, Solana is actively laying the groundwork to make its finance-first vision a reality.

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