Building Solana City, Solana Foundation Chairman Solar Community Interview Summary

24-07-25 21:00

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Article source: Solar

On the evening of July 23, the new brand of Solana Chinese Community, Solar, officially organized the first Solar Community Solana Ecosystem Monthly Meeting. Lily Liu, Chairman of the Solana Foundation, attended the event and had an in-depth exchange with the entire Chinese community in Chinese for the first time through live broadcast.

Through this exchange, we can see that the Solana Foundation attaches great importance to the Chinese ecosystem, community and developers. At the same time, Lily also repeatedly emphasized Solana's vision as a value chain and the direction it hopes to promote in the live broadcast.

The following is the Q&A summary of this event:

Q1: Please let Lily introduce herself to the partners in the Chinese-speaking area

A1:Hello everyone, I am Lily, I am the chairman of the Solana Foundation, I now live in Europe, I discovered Bitcoin 10 years ago in Shanghai, when blockchain was just Bitcoin. Before I entered the blockchain, I was doing more traditional financial work. I was born and raised in California, and my family's ancestral home is in Hunan. After I went to college and graduate school at Stanford and Harvard, I worked in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in Hong Kong, and then joined McKinsey, and also worked at private equity fund KKR. During the process, I may have worked in Shanghai, Beijing, and Hong Kong for about 5 years, so I still have a better understanding of China, and even started my crypto journey here.

I heard about Bitcoin at my university alumni meeting 10 years ago. At that time, I just thought it was a technology for money laundering until I read the Bitcoin white paper. I read the Bitcoin white paper about 7/8 times before I had a deeper understanding of this industry and realized that this is a very profound change. Now I am in my 10th year in this industry. My first blockchain project In 2018, we sold earn.com to Coinbase, and I started working on some other projects.

3 years ago, I learned about Solana and realized that this is the only technology that can compare with the user experience of web2. At that time, I was in San Francisco and made an appointment to meet with the founder of Solana. I didn't expect that after a few months, I would start to join this community and even start working in the Solana Foundation. In the past few years, one of our focuses has been how to help Solanat start to build some communities of these developers around the world. So I am personally very happy to have this opportunity to work with Adam, Daniel and Yaoyao to start building a community in the Chinese-speaking area.

Q2: Unique community culture has always been an important part of the Solana ecosystem that Solana is proud of. Many builders have established multiple decentralized communities around the world, including superteam, to jointly promote the vigorous development of the Solana ecosystem. Solar, a Chinese community brand that was recently launched, will also be committed to creating a unique Solana community culture in the Chinese-speaking region. Please share your understanding of Solana community culture as the chairman of the foundation, and why decentralized community building is so important?

A2 One of the biggest reasons why Solana attracted me is culture. In the past ten years, there have been many different blockchain projects, many good technologies and innovations, and many good facilities. But I think that blockchain is not just a technology. Blockchain itself is a culture and a community.

What is the core of building a very large and successful community? I think it is value. Establish a feasible and practical technology, establish a good technology platform, and let the developers of the technology use it to make applications. This application can bring value to users, and it is a value that web2 cannot achieve.

At the same time, this community is not just a place to chat. Building a community is more like building a small city. So from the beginning, we believed that Solana is not only a blockchain, nor is it just a technology platform. It is a concept of a city. We hope that it has both culture, facilities, economy, and internal values. We have always hoped to build our community in this way.

At the same time, in this community, community members should uphold the concept of "ask not what the chain can do for you, but what you can do for your chain" (don't ask what this chain can bring to you, but ask what you can bring to this chain). We hope that our communities in various regions will contribute to our Solana city, and our Solana city can also bring good opportunities to our builders. In the past few years, we have many builders who have been contributing to the construction of this city, and they have also gained their own success in the process.

The success of a chain does not only depend on the foundation, which is only doing part of the work in this regard. More investors, developers and users are attracted to this chain, which still depends mainly on our builders.

Q3: As one of the representative brands of the community, Superteam has achieved outstanding results worldwide. Now Solar will also start the journey of community building in the Chinese-speaking area. I would like to ask Lily to share how you view the potential of the Chinese-speaking community? What are your expectations for the future development of Solar?

A3：I think the Chinese community is a very important community and a very important market for the entire blockchain and the entire global industry.

I have always felt that there are two major markets in the blockchain, one is the English area, and the second is the Chinese area. The characteristics of the English area and the Chinese area are somewhat different. The English area is of course led by the United States, which is the largest developer community, but the second largest is the Chinese area.

Some other differences are that I think the English area pays more attention to facilities. In the past 10 to 15 years, I think this is very helpful for some innovations. However, now I think that in this round, Ethereum has been doing some innovations in l2 and l3, but there is no matching user demand. I think it has been overheated. Some consumer applications that can really reach end consumers can run out in this bull market and truly promote large-scale application in the industry.

I think an important thing about the Chinese area is that it is better at doing applications and application layers. Solana can provide a very ready-made and practical blockchain facility to support applications. I hope to start shifting some developers' time and attention from facilities to applications. In terms of applications, our largest global developer community should be in the Chinese-speaking region.

Q4: In your opinion, what are the key directions or events worth paying attention to in the second half of Solana?

A4: I think each round has different focuses. Like the last round, it was more focused on NFT and creators, but I think this round of bull market is more focused on some financial applications.

In fact, I think the core of blockchain itself is financial products. Its original value is financial relations, so in 2015 and 2019, each round will make some innovations and advances in this aspect. I think there are several aspects this time, and our entire industry will have some relatively large innovations:

One is payment. I think the reason why payment is more realistic now is because of the existence of Solana. Solana now has a relatively large scale, and the one related to payment is stable currency. Stablecoins are very popular around the world now. Originally, it was just USDT, but now USDC is also growing. There are many innovations in the stablecoin industry, and it is not only related to the US dollar.

Recently, a few weeks ago, new policies emerged in Europe. Now, they recognize stablecoins as a cash-related payment method in Europe. It also brings a great boost to the entire stablecoin and the entire blockchain industry. In Asia, there are also many stablecoin pilots. For example, in Hong Kong, there was some news last week that 3~4 companies officially started nuclear tests of stablecoins in Hong Kong. So I hope that there will be a KHD stablecoin next year.

We have already seen many new FinTech products, one of which is a stablecoin credit card. Now there are several companies working on such a user financial application. In fact, I entered the blockchain industry because I believe in such a global vision.

I think that it has not been realized in the past 15 years because Bitcoin is very expensive and very slow, and it takes an hour to complete a transaction. Ethereum is of course a further performance, but Ethereum also takes two minutes and two yuan to complete a general transaction, which cannot support any payment-related products.

In this round, we can finally realize the combination of payment platform and project strength, so as to realize more special applications that can only happen on the blockchain. What Solana wants to do is to build a value chain from payment, stablecoin asset management and the entire financial-related products.

Q5: Recently, I saw that you mentioned the concept of PayFi at many important industry conferences. Can you introduce it to partners in the Chinese-speaking region?

A5：I think Solana is the successor of Bitcoin's initial vision. In the past, I don't think any other chain can realize the vision that Bitcoin originally provided us.

When I first discovered Bitcoin, I read the white paper. Bitcoin's original vision was to program money, program for money, micro payments, and global financial system.

And what are the subsequent applications based on this vision? I think this is a very big task and a very big opportunity. Whether it is Solana, Bitcoin or Ethereum, the entire industry can do it together. But up to now, no other community, no other chain, or technology can do it.

I think PayFi is a vision that Bitcoin gave us.

We have talked about this several times at the conference, which is some specific examples of PayFi. I now think that PayFi can start with a payment and a stable currency, and then start to make complex financial products on the chain. I think this is a very large market. Of course, these concepts already exist in traditional industries.

I think that blockchain, as a new industry, does not necessarily need to establish a completely new market, but can bring more valuable products and more valuable solutions to the existing market based on blockchain.

About Solar

Solar is a new decentralized Solana Chinese community organization, dedicated to promoting the vigorous development of the Solana ecosystem in the Chinese-speaking region and bringing Chinese power into the Solana ecosystem.

It is reported that in the past year, the Solana Chinese community has organized more than 100 online and offline events in multiple cities in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Singapore and other places, gathering more than 1,500 high-quality Chinese developers and promoting more than 250 Chinese projects to participate in the Solana hackathon. Solar will continue the vision of the Solana Chinese community, continue to empower the community, continue to organize various forms of ecological activities and localized developer education activities, and provide multi-faceted support for Chinese developers and entrepreneurs.

The Solar community is currently recruiting early community contributors, including technical experts, opinion leaders, community ambassadors, student ambassadors, etc. Community contributors will have the opportunity to deeply participate in the construction of the Solana ecosystem and get in touch with the Solana Foundation and first-line resources at home and abroad.

For more details, please follow Solar's official Twitter: https://x.com/Solana_zh