Original title: "Lily, President of Solana Foundation: What is the biggest narrative of this cycle? Where is the next step for encrypted payments?"

Original author: James, BlockTempo

Lily Liu, President of the Solana Foundation, attended the ABS Asia Blockchain Summit to deliver a keynote speech entitled "PayFi" and had a conversation with Cal King, founder of Taiwan Validator, to discuss cryptocurrency culture and trends, and the role Solana plays in it.

The venue was packed with audiences, who listened together to hear what innovations Solana, the most popular public chain currently, will bring in the future.

PayFi on Solana

First, Lily Liu talked about a settlement-based DeFi concept - PayFi. In just 20 minutes of speech, Lily Liu outlined the specific outline of PayFi and provided the following examples:

Retail environments: For example, using cryptocurrencies for “Buy Now, Pay Never” transactions and using interest from lending platforms to pay for purchases.

Digital content creators: Creators can fund their next project by taking advances on future revenue, which is difficult to achieve in the traditional financial world.

Accounts receivable: Companies can use cryptocurrencies to quickly obtain cash flow from accounts receivable and reduce waiting time, which is a huge market.

In addition, to match the innovative concept of PayFi, fast payments and low transaction costs are important, but more importantly, the technology should enable 10x utility use cases. Lily Liu said: Solana has the advantages of high performance, capital liquidity and talent liquidity, and is the only blockchain that can achieve these benefits.

ABS Formosa Venue Lily Speech Topic PayFi

Lily Liu's Fireside Chat

Lily Liu’s second speech was a fireside chat with Cal King, founder of Taiwan Validator. Lily first talked about how he first came into contact with Bitcoin in 2013 when he heard the story of Bitcoin from Bobby Lee, the founder of BTCC, the first Bitcoin exchange in China.

From Encryption Scam to Encryption Changing the World

At first, Lily, like ordinary people, thought that Bitcoin was a scam, but after Bobby Lee’s constant brainwashing and mentioning, Lily compromised and read the Bitcoin white paper. After reading it, she was convinced that cryptocurrency was not only not a scam, but a technological innovation that could change the world:

“I read the white paper and I was like, this is definitely not a scam. It’s very interesting because it’s very simple, but this simple concept — that you have digital property rights — is actually very profound.

You could say that having a legal system that enforces property rights is also a simple thing, but in fact, it is fundamental to the success of human civilization. So it's a simple but very fundamental thing, and the technological innovation that can enforce this in a digital environment is transformative.

That really caught my attention because not only does this resemble the foundations of successful societies and economies in the non-technological world and the non-digital world in the beginning, but when you add programmability on top of that, it becomes really crazy. I think there’s still a ton of innovation that’s yet to be discovered and we’re still very early in this journey.”

Cryptocurrency goes mainstream

In addition, Lily also has her own views on the mainstreaming of cryptocurrency, and said that Bitcoin is already a mainstream financial product:

“The way cryptocurrencies gain mainstream adoption, I think, is a little counter-intuitive, you have to have your edge, your power, your critical mass (reaching enough users, supporters, or resources for a cryptocurrency to scale further), and then that’s how you convert to the mainstream.

So Bitcoin ultimately flipped Wall Street through the Bitcoin ETF, and that was ultimately what facilitated mainstream integration into existing Wall Street institutions, so I think Bitcoin has now gone through the process of turning mainstream.”

From "Infrastructure" to "Applications"

When Cal King asked Lily about her vision for the future of the Solana Foundation, Lily said it was time to move from building infrastructure to building infrastructure for applications:

“I want to be part of an ecosystem that builds actually useful applications and builds infrastructure for useful applications, rather than building infrastructure for other infrastructure to be used by other people to build more infrastructure.”

Lily mentioned PayFi, which was presented at Formosa 3 stage this morning, as well as Actions and Blinds previously launched by the Solana ecosystem:

“Just talking about PayFi on our Solana stage, you can build new credit models on-chain and make them available to small transactions that can’t get credit in the existing financial system, whether it’s individuals or self-employed people, which actually involves a large number of people and transactions.

That’s very interesting to me. We launched Actions and Blinks, which you could call developer tools, which I think is very exciting and rich. It basically allows you to embed Solana transactions on the internet, which I think is very powerful and starts to explore how you can embed on-chain commerce into the consumer internet experience.”

Financial cluster is the biggest narrative of this round of crypto cycle

Finally, Cal King asked Lily what blockchain trends she is most concerned about at the moment. Lily said that financial clusters are the biggest narrative in this round of crypto cycles, and Solana has a natural advantage:

“A lot of people are very excited about payments, going back to what I think is one of the original and still unsolved use cases in crypto. I think that this can only scale on Solana. Everyone can do a proof of concept, but the only place it can really take off is Solana because there is performance and liquidity here, and you don’t need to decentralize both.

So I think that's a focus right now across the industry, payments and physical assets. I think after this cycle, it's probably going to go back to non-financial applications. NFTs are a little bit stagnant right now, but like anything in crypto, every cycle has a theme, and then it's very volatile, and then another theme comes out. So, I think this is a very financially oriented cycle, not just payments, but also physical assets (RWA), institutional finance entering the on-chain liquidity pool.

I think more broadly, you could call it a financial cluster, we call it the Solana economy, bringing these financial elements together to create an integrated value chain. I think that’s the biggest theme of this cycle.”

Interview with Lily and Cal King in the Jing Mind Circle

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