Solana Foundation president sees a 'token supercycle' reshaping finance
Thu, September 3, 2026 at 1:24 AM GMT+3 2 min read
Solana Foundation president Lily Liu has laid out the case for what she calls the "token supercycle", a long-term shift in which money, assets and ownership move onto blockchain infrastructure permanently, not as a trend but as a structural change in how markets work.
Solana is a high-speed blockchain network designed for fast, low-cost transactions. The Solana Foundation is the nonprofit organization that supports the network's development and ecosystem growth.
In an op-ed published Sep. 2, Liu argued that tokenization, the process of representing real-world assets like stocks, bonds or real estate as digital tokens on a blockchain, is not just another technology cycle but a fundamental reworking of who can issue, invest in and distribute financial assets.
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Four forces converging at once
Liu pointed to four developments that she says have now converged. Stablecoins, digital tokens pegged to currencies like the U.S. dollar, have proven that money can move onchain at global scale. Financial institutions are beginning to bring traditional assets onto blockchains.
The underlying infrastructure has gotten fast and cheap enough to handle real economic activity. And AI is creating a new class of software-based economic actors that need programmable money to function.
The data backs up at least part of that thesis. More than $4.7 trillion in stablecoins moved across Solana in the past year, Liu wrote. Separately, Blockworks data shows tokenized equities on Solana reached a circulating supply of roughly $683 million in August 2026, up from approximately $5.8 million in June 2025.
The network also processed a record 5.2 billion non-vote transactions in August, its busiest month ever.
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From access to ownership
Liu framed the opportunity in terms of access. Traditional capital markets are gated by geography, minimum investment sizes, and brokerage relationships, she argued.
Tokenization removes those barriers, allowing anyone with an internet connection to own a piece of what the economy produces. She called this "universal basic ownership."
She also argued the shift has a competitive dimension. Major institutions, including the New York Stock Exchange, DTCC, and the London Stock Exchange, are already exploring onchain equity markets, Liu noted. Visa uses Solana for USDC settlement, PayPal brought its stablecoin onto the network, and Western Union launched its own stablecoin on Solana.
Liu acknowledged that onchain volumes remain small relative to traditional markets, but argued that measuring the shift by today's numbers misses where it's heading.
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This story was originally published by TheStreet on Sep 2, 2026, where it first appeared in the Innovation section. Add TheStreet as a Preferred Source by clicking here.
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