Chairman of the Solana Foundation: The internet capital market will become the largest capital market

Author: Lily Liu, Chair of the Solana Foundation

Compiled by: Jiahua, ChainCatcher

Value is becoming programmable.

The market is moving towards digitalization, currency is moving towards digitization, and finance is moving towards the internet. Each transformation has changed the way transactions, payments, and investments are made, but has not changed the assets themselves; this time, it is the assets themselves that are changing.

The tokenization supercycle is a long-term process: currency, assets, and ownership are gradually migrating to an always-online internet infrastructure. If viewed merely as a market upturn, one would miss the larger transformation behind it.

The internet capital market formed as a result will ultimately become the largest capital market in the world.

The Supercycle Will Reshape the Market

In the early 21st century, China's rapid industrialization drove commodities into a prolonged structural upcycle. Economists referred to it as a "supercycle": a sustained change in supply, demand, and capital allocation that lasts longer than typical business cycles. The United States in the late 19th century, as well as Europe and Japan during the post-war reconstruction period, experienced similar cycles.

In the past, such shocks typically appeared from one end of the market and gradually spread; tokenization, however, is changing the market simultaneously from three directions: it alters who issues assets, who can invest, and how assets reach investors.

Four forces that originally developed along their own trajectories are now converging:

• Stablecoins demonstrate that currency can circulate on-chain at scale globally;

• Financial institutions are bringing assets on-chain;

• Blockchain infrastructure is now capable of meeting the speed and cost demands of real economic activities;

• AI is creating a new class of economic participants, which cannot operate effectively without programmable currency.

Individually, these four forces represent a technological cycle; but together, they bring more than just a technological upgrade. In the future, anything of value could be tokenized, corresponding to clear and defined ownership; people can use this to obtain financing and trade these assets in a market that never closes.

Issuers: Distribution Capability Determines Valuation

Traditional systems were born in an era where information sharing and value transfer were both difficult and costly. Today, these two limitations no longer exist, but the market structure formed as a result still remains.

As a result, liquidity remains fragmented. Each market has quality assets, but they may not reach the funds willing to hold them, as these funds may be restricted by different regulatory systems and investment thresholds.

Tokenization broadens market access. Geography is no longer a barrier: assets issued anywhere can potentially reach global investors at any time. Investment scale is also no longer a barrier: markets that were originally only open to institutional funds can now also be opened to smaller funds at very low costs.

This model was actually validated over a century ago. American Depositary Receipts (ADRs) converted foreign stocks into a form that American investors could purchase. The reason issuers adopted this structure is simple: after entering a deeper capital pool, the same cash flow often achieves a higher valuation. The mechanism and underlying logic have long been validated, but the costs were high and the applicability narrow, requiring the involvement of depositary banks and initiators.

Today, expanding this mechanism to a larger scale is essentially a technical issue. Tokenization precisely addresses this: regardless of asset class or jurisdiction, it can connect to this mechanism. In the future, the ability to distribute assets will become part of valuation.

This is already happening. In the past year, real-world assets (RWAs) worth hundreds of billions of dollars have been traded on Solana. Tokenized government bonds, stocks, private credit, and other assets are gaining distribution channels and liquidity through on-chain markets. These are early signs that capital can flow as freely as information and be accessible at any time.

Traditional financial institutions have also begun exploring this area. The New York Stock Exchange, the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC), and the London Stock Exchange are all studying the specific forms of on-chain stock markets.

Investors: Making Ownership Inclusive

The same infrastructure will provide investors with two capabilities: obtaining asset ownership and using assets to obtain financing.

Owning assets can open up markets that were previously closed due to geography, minimum investment amounts, or investor qualification thresholds; using assets to obtain financing allows already held assets to truly function: they can be used as collateral for loans or become income-generating investments. A vast amount of global wealth exists in forms that are difficult to finance or even impossible to pledge. Tokenization can activate this dormant wealth.

This goal can be termed "universal foundational ownership": anyone with internet access has the opportunity to own a portion of the value created by economic activities and allow that portion of assets to continue creating value.

Entry Points: Any Application Can Become a Super App

Traditional capital markets are built around intermediary institutions. For assets to reach investors, they typically need to go through licensed institutions, and each jurisdiction and asset class often has its own intermediary system. These institutions charge fees for providing services between the two parties in a transaction.

This structure formed because distributing assets was indeed difficult in the past. The barriers of this system come from both regulation and integration costs: accessing payment networks, custodians, and trading venues often takes years.

Programmable currency reduces integration costs to the level of a single API call. Any mobile or web application can add payment and trading functionalities on top of existing features. In other words, any application could potentially become a super app.

The real mainline is integration. Payments, settlements, asset issuance, and market trading, which used to rely on different financial systems, are now increasingly operating on the same programmable infrastructure.

Solana's low costs and shared liquidity make this integration possible. Consumer payments, institutional settlements, and global markets can operate on the same platform, allowing liquidity to accumulate and converge across different application scenarios rather than being dispersed in isolated markets.

This is no longer just an experiment. Visa uses Solana for USDC settlements; PayPal has brought PYUSD payments and funding capabilities to the network; MoneyGram provides a conversion channel between fiat and digital assets; Western Union has launched the USDPT stablecoin on Solana. In the past year, the scale of stablecoin transfers on this network has exceeded $4.7 trillion.

Issuers, investors, and application entry points will also mutually promote each other: the more issuers there are, the richer the asset supply; the richer the assets, the more they can attract investors; the more investors there are, the stronger the liquidity and more adequate the pricing, which in turn attracts more issuers. Application entry points run through the entire cycle: each new entry expands the reach of both assets and funds, while each new asset provides more targets for applications to access and distribute.

AI Accelerates This Cycle

AI will further accelerate this cycle. It brings a new type of economic participant to the financial system that has never existed at scale before: software that can autonomously complete economic activities.

With the help of crypto assets, AI Agents can independently assess demand, seek services, make payments, obtain results, and then continue acting without human initiation for each transaction. This will open up a new business model where transactions are autonomously completed by AI Agents. AI creates new economic participants, while blockchain provides a programmable, always-on financial infrastructure for these participants to complete transactions.

AI will also amplify the aforementioned three-way effects. The construction of AI infrastructure will draw market attention to a new batch of issuers, as the real-world capacity supporting AI development requires financing, which will bring new asset supply. AI Agents will increasingly act as autonomous investors, allocating capital without human intervention; they will also become new transaction entry points.

When ownership and intent can be read by machines, asset allocation and settlement can operate at machine speed. Energy markets and payment systems will no longer be segmented by geography but will be built on shared infrastructure. Near-zero-cost payment networks will replace traditional networks that charge proportional fees based on transaction amounts while adding fixed fees; always-on markets will replace limited trading hours.

Institutions that truly understand this will provide financing for the next round of real-world capacity (data centers, energy, and production facilities) more efficiently than those treating tokenization as a novelty.

We Are Still in the Early Stages

Compared to traditional markets, on-chain trading volumes are still small; the scale of tokenized assets compared to their traditional counterparts is also small enough to be nearly negligible. This description accurately reflects the present but cannot predict the future.

The internet has brought the cost of producing and distributing information down to nearly zero. What followed was not simply "moving newspapers online," but entirely new markets and business models that had never existed before. Tokenized government bonds represent the "newspaper going online" stage: it is a useful demonstration but not the endpoint.

There are already 5.5 billion people connected to the internet. A financial infrastructure that can operate at any time, for everyone, and support any asset will make the largest global market revolving around funds accessible. Once global liquidity is online, its appeal will be so strong that it will be irresistible.

Borderless Markets

So far, every capital market has clear entry boundaries: exchange seats, brokerage channels, jurisdictions, and trading hours collectively determine who can enter. The internet capital market is gradually loosening these boundaries.

The system that truly undertakes this transformation will not just be an upgraded version of the old system, but a new system that is being gradually built by individual tokens.