Lily Liu

Lily Liu was born and raised in California, with family roots in Changsha, Hunan. She earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and international relations from Stanford UniversityStanford UniversityStanford University is a research university in California founded by Leland and Jane Stanford in 1885 and opened in 1891.Open the full entry and later studied East Asian studies at Harvard UniversityHarvard UniversityHarvard University is a private research university in Massachusetts, established by the Massachusetts Bay Colony legislature in 1636 and named in 1639 for early benefactor John Harvard. Its principal campuses are in Cambridge and the Allston and Longwood neighborhoods of Boston. It includes Harvard College, graduate and professional schools, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Two governing boards share oversight. Alan M. Garber was president as of October 2026, and the endowment stood at $56.9 billion at the end of fiscal 2025.Open the full entry. In interviews, she has described her long-standing interest in China’s modern economic transformation, institutions, and incentive mechanisms as an important intellectual background for her later understanding of Bitcoin and open networks. Public sources do not consistently state the specific degree corresponding to her Harvard studies. Reliable public sources also do not give her year and month of birth.⁠[2]

Lily Liu’s Chinese name is Liu Yuanli, and her family roots are in Changsha, Hunan. A Foresight News profile interview states that her parents left the mainland for Taiwan with their families around 1949, later went to the United States to study and settled there, becoming first-generation immigrants; Liu was born in the United States. She regards living with her grandparents as a young child and eating the Hunan dishes they cooked every day as part of how she stays connected to Chinese culture. After graduating from Stanford, she worked for long periods in Beijing, Shanghai, and elsewhere, and this trans-Pacific family experience helped her understand both the American institutional environment and Chinese-speaking markets. The migration narrative comes from the profile interview.⁠[3]

Lily Liu has said publicly in interviews that her life at this stage consists mainly of work, family, and self-care, and that family matters most in the long run, but that she does not see work and family as being in conflict. She mentioned that she has two daughters and hopes they will see their mother take on demanding, global leadership work rather than having the limits of their abilities set by gender assumptions; this outlook comes from her mother’s upbringing—her mother never lowered her expectations for her resources, opportunities, or future because she was a girl.⁠[4]

Lily Liu’s finance career began with investment banking at Morgan StanleyMorgan StanleyMorgan Stanley is an American global financial services firm that grew from an investment banking partnership into a publicly traded financial group spanning investment banking, securities trading, wealth management, and investment management.Open the full entry in Hong Kong. She then worked in McKinseyMcKinsey & CompanyMcKinsey & Company is a management consulting firm headquartered in New York, United States. It was founded in Chicago in 1926 by University of Chicago professor James O. McKinsey and, after Marvin Bower established its “professional service” principles, grew into one of the largest pure consulting firms in the world; as of October 2026 it has more than 100 offices in over 50 countries and about 40,000 employees. It has also repeatedly faced regulatory investigations and public criticism over episodes such as its work with Enron, a former leader’s insider trading case, and its consulting for opioid manufacturers.Open the full entry’s New York and Beijing offices, a full-time period she summarized in an interview as roughly 2005–2008; she then joined KKRKKRKKR (Kohlberg Kravis Roberts) is an investment firm engaged in alternative asset management, capital markets services, and insurance. Jerome Kohlberg, Henry Kravis, and George Roberts co-founded the firm in 1976. Its managed funds invest in private equity, credit, and real assets, and its subsidiary Global Atlantic operates retirement, life insurance, and reinsurance businesses. KKR listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2010 under the ticker KKR.Open the full entry, working mainly in New York on private equity. These experiences gave her a background in cross-border financing, company operations, and institutional investing, and also explain the focus on finance and organizational design that she later brought to her healthcare venture, the 21 Inc. restructuring, and the management of a blockchain foundation.⁠[2]

Before entering the crypto industry, Lily Liu served as Chief Financial Officer of Chinaco Healthcare Corporation and helped build a 500-bed private hospital in China. In later interviews, she placed the project in Cixi, Zhejiang, and called it her first entrepreneurial experience. The healthcare project had nothing to do with software or digital assets, but it involved cross-border capital, construction timelines, regulation, and physical operations; she regards it as a period of learning to build organizations and deliver large projects in complex environments. Existing sources do not give start and end dates for her tenure precise to the month.⁠[1]

In 2013, while living and working in Shanghai, Lily Liu was introduced to BitcoinBitcoinBitcoin (common symbol BTC) is an open peer-to-peer electronic cash protocol, network, and native digital asset. Full nodes independently verify transactions and blocks according to the consensus rules; transactions are recorded as UTXOs, and blocks are organized into a public ledger through proof of work. Bitcoin is not issued or managed by any single institution, but using, holding in custody, and trading it still involve key, privacy, market, and legal risks.Open the full entry by Bobby Lee, a fellow Stanford alumnus and the founder of BTCC. She recalled that she initially saw Bitcoin as a fringe technology that might be used for money laundering, and only after reading the white paper repeatedly did she come to focus on its significance for permissionless asset ownership and global value transfer. This milestone is her own account of a personal shift in thinking.⁠[4]

Lily Liu said in a direct interview that in 2014 she joined BTC China (BTCC), founded by Bobby Lee, and returned to the United States after working there for about three or four months. She then met Balaji SrinivasanBalaji SrinivasanBalaji Srinivasan is an entrepreneur, investor and the author of The Network State, the founder of Network School, and a former chief technology officer of Coinbase and general partner at Andreessen Horowitz. He co-founded Counsyl and 21, along with its successor product Earn.com, was involved in projects such as Coin Center, and has backed companies such as fomo as an angel investor.Open the full entry and joined the turnaround of 21 Inc., which was then under financial pressure. This brief stint links her introduction to Bitcoin through Bobby Lee in 2013 with her later involvement in 21 Inc. and Earn.com; the three or four months is her own summary years later.⁠[5]

Lily Liu says she entered the Bitcoin industry full-time starting in 2014 and returned to the United States. She subsequently worked with Balaji Srinivasan and others to take over 21 Inc., an early Bitcoin hardware and mining startup. In several interviews, she has described the company at the time as heavily indebted, with its cash and product progress under strain, and said the team then changed its business model and product, gradually turning the company into a platform that paid people in digital currency for replying to emails and completing tasks. The financial details above are her own recollection; 21 Inc. was not originally founded by Lily Liu.⁠[2]

In November 2017, 21.co officially changed its name to Earn.com. The new name corresponded directly to its product model: users could earn digital currency by replying to paid emails, completing tasks, or taking part in project activities. Lily Liu is listed in external biographies as a co-founder and Chief Financial Officer of Earn.com. The project was not simply a renaming of the original mining hardware business but went through ongoing restructuring of its team, code, product, and revenue model; it was also an important milestone in her shift from traditional finance and company operations to practical crypto payment applications.⁠[6]

On April 16, 2018, CoinbaseCoinbaseCoinbase is a U.S. operator of crypto asset trading platforms, founded in 2012 by Brian Armstrong and Fred Ehrsam, whose listed parent is Coinbase Global, Inc.; it went public through a direct listing on Nasdaq (ticker COIN) in April 2021 and joined the S&P 500 in May 2025. It provides crypto trading, custody, staking, and stablecoin-related services, launched USDC with Circle, develops the Ethereum layer-2 network Base, and acquired the crypto options exchange Deribit in 2025; its venture investing operates as Coinbase Ventures.Open the full entry announced its acquisition of Earn.com; the Earn.com team joined Coinbase, and co-founder and CEO Balaji Srinivasan became Coinbase’s first Chief Technology Officer. Coinbase described Earn.com as a product that lets senders pay users in cryptocurrency to reply to emails or complete tasks, and said it would continue to invest in the business. Public reports gave differing estimates of the deal price, but Coinbase’s announcement did not disclose a definite price.⁠[7]

After the sale of Earn.com, Lily Liu continued to take part in digital asset projects as an investor, adviser, and builder. Her current public biography lists her as a co-founder of Anagram, a blockchain investment and building firm; an official Ledger interview also lists her as a co-founder of Osmosis, while an earlier program used the title “founding team member.” Public sources differ slightly on the founding dates of Anagram and Osmosis and on her formal titles.⁠[8]

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lily Liu worked on supply chains for medical protective equipment. A World Economic Forum profile lists her as President of Aiden Health and a co-founder of Operation Masks; in a 2021 direct interview, she also described this period as involving the procurement and distribution of personal protective equipment. Public company materials have given cumulative delivery figures, but these are self-reported by the company and are not attributed item by item to Liu on the same page.⁠[9]

In 2021, at the invitation of Solana co-founders Anatoly YakovenkoAnatoly YakovenkoAnatoly Yakovenko is a software engineer, a co-founder of Solana, and CEO of Solana Labs. He previously worked at Qualcomm, Mesosphere, and Dropbox, proposed Proof of History (PoH) in 2017, and went on to help develop the Solana network. He has also driven Solana Mobile’s mobile products, made angel investments in projects such as Jito Labs, and was named in 2026 to the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Innovation Advisory Committee.Open the full entry and Raj GokalRaj GokalRaj Gokal is a co-founder of Solana, president of Solana Labs, and a director of the Solana Foundation. Early on he worked in financial investing and digital health ventures, co-founded Sano, and served as director of product at Omada Health. He is mainly involved in Solana’s business, organizational, and product development, and as an angel investor he has also backed startups such as fomo.Open the full entry, Lily Liu joined Solana and gradually took charge of the foundation’s affairs. She says that after actually using DeFi products on Solana that year, she was drawn to the Web2-like interaction made possible by low latency and low transaction costs. Her view is that for a public blockchain to achieve large-scale adoption, it needs both technical performance and an active community. Some early programs in 2021 still referred to her as an adviser to the foundation, suggesting that her external title may not yet have been fully standardized at the time.⁠[10]

After FTXFTXFTX was a cryptocurrency exchange founded in 2019 by Sam Bankman-Fried and Gary Wang that operated FTX.com, moved its headquarters from Hong Kong to the Bahamas in 2021 and was valued at $32 billion in January 2022. In November 2022 it filed for U.S. bankruptcy protection amid a liquidity crisis, and Bankman-Fried was later convicted of fraud and related charges. Its reorganization plan took effect in January 2025, after which the FTX Recovery Trust began paying creditors in stages.Open the full entry collapsed in November 2022, Solana was hit hard because of the investment and asset ties between FTX, Alameda, and ecosystem projects. Lily Liu recalled that from November to December 2022 the foundation focused on helping affected projects, and that in 2023 it continued to face network outages and questions about outside confidence. She said the number of active developers did not fall as sharply as prices and public sentiment, and that hackathon participation remained high in early 2023; these developer figures reflect the foundation’s and her own accounting at the time. She summarized this period as first making sure projects and developers “survived,” then restoring growth.⁠[11]

Lily Liu said she had hoped to expand into the Asia-Pacific market when she joined the Solana Foundation in 2021, but the team waited nearly two years; after the FTX collapse and policy changes in Hong Kong, the foundation decided in February and March 2023 to significantly increase its investment in the Chinese-speaking region and Asia-Pacific. She summarized the reason as the region having both developer supply and capital markets, not just user traffic. The decision was part of the foundation’s reallocation of regional resources during a downturn.⁠[12]

In the same interview, Lily Liu called independent developers the most essential asset of a blockchain ecosystem and evaluated regions by two criteria, the “labor market” and the “capital market”: Silicon Valley, New York, India, Germany, and other places have developer bases of varying depth, but she believes the U.S. market and the Chinese-speaking market more fully combine strong developer supply with capital support. She also said that at the time roughly 80% or more of Solana’s core trading flow went through Asia-Pacific exchanges, a figure based on the foundation’s internal observations.⁠[12]

In April 2023, the Solana Foundation announced that, in addition to traditional open-source public goods grants, it would introduce capital deployment methods such as convertible grants and direct investments to support projects that both create public value for the ecosystem and have a business model. The policy reflects the foundation’s expansion during Lily Liu’s tenure from a single grant tool to multiple support mechanisms; it is a collective foundation policy. The foundation also emphasized that it does not itself build for-profit products and prefers to let private capital fund commercial projects.⁠[13]

Lily Liu said Solana has stepped up developer training, community building, and investment support in the Chinese-speaking region since 2023, citing local developers’ speed of execution, payments experience, and capital activity. She described PayFi as the category of financial applications that combine payments with smart contracts and DeFi, and argued that Solana should not revolve around any single sector such as DeFi, NFTs, DePIN, or memecoins, but should become an “Everything Chain” capable of supporting many kinds of assets and applications. These statements are the foundation’s strategic vision.⁠[4]

On November 22, 2024, hardware wallet company Ledger announced that Lily Liu had joined its board of directors. Ledger said her experience in traditional finance, cross-regional operations, and the blockchain industry would support the company’s global expansion. Liu summarized the two sides’ shared focus as self-custody and argued that self-custody is tied to digital property rights and individual sovereignty.⁠[14]

In May 2025, R3 announced a partnership with the Solana Foundation and invited Lily Liu to join R3’s board. By September 2026, Corda’s current official team page listed her as a member of R3’s board while also noting her role as President of the Solana Foundation. The partnership aims to connect R3’s permissioned financial infrastructure with the Solana public blockchain, giving regulated real-world assets broader on-chain distribution and liquidity. The directorship has been confirmed by the current official website, but specific technical services, asset migration, and institutional adoption are still in progress.⁠[15]

In a Chinese-language livestream in June 2025, Lily Liu described the Solana Foundation as an ecosystem coordinator rather than the chain’s “headquarters” or parent company, and said the team has long stayed at about 70 to 75 people. She set out an organizational philosophy of “community capitalism” and “Founders, not employees”: contributors of code, content, products, and more should be seen as potential stakeholders, and hiring favors “10X People” who can independently identify problems and carry work through to completion, rather than people who wait for assignments. She also explained local organizations such as Superteam and Solar as a way of adapting to the cultures and developer ecosystems of different regions, not a traditional corporate headquarters-and-branch structure. The headcount and organizational outcomes are the foundation’s figures as stated during the livestream.⁠[16]

Lily Liu summarized the Solana Foundation’s work as two interdependent objectives: attracting the best talent and attracting capital. She argued that having the foundation directly “pick winners” would limit competition, but that mechanically applying “credible neutrality” to an organization of people is unrealistic, because leaders must still openly exercise taste and judgment and take the risk of being wrong; the alternative principle she proposed is “open meritocracy,” actively fostering competition and letting the market decide whether teams succeed. On the perpetual futures ecosystem, she said there are multiple views within the foundation, that past public communications had not fully reflected the actual scope of its support, and that the foundation supports multiple building teams and the harder-to-achieve fully on-chain architecture.⁠[17]

Lily Liu recounted a time-sensitive international wire transfer: after it was sent on a Monday, the funds could not be traced for a time, and the bank said transfers usually take 1 to 7 business days and that the wire investigation team would only step in after 7 full business days. She used Claude to organize the UETR number, MT103 report, and SWIFT gpi status to press customer service about, and the funds ultimately reached the recipient on day 5. From this she concluded that the main value of on-chain cross-border payments is not just saving the roughly $25 wire fee, but shortening waits, providing round-the-clock traceability, and reducing the drain that uncertain status puts on business timelines and people’s energy.⁠[18]

In 2025, the Aguilar v. Baton Corporation class action was amended to name Solana Labs, the Solana Foundation, and several executives including Lily Liu as defendants; the plaintiffs sought to assert securities law, RICO, and unjust enrichment claims over token issuance and trading on Pump.fun. On August 31, 2026, the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed all claims against Lily Liu, the Solana Foundation, Solana Labs, and the related executives. The ruling still allowed certain RICO claims by some plaintiffs against Pump.fun operator Baton Corporation and its three founders to proceed.⁠[19]

In a bylined CoinDeskCoinDeskCoinDesk is a cryptocurrency media, events, index, and data company founded in 2013 and headquartered in New York. Its businesses include the CoinDesk news website, the annual crypto industry conference Consensus, and the CoinDesk Indices index business. In November 2023, the digital asset exchange Bullish acquired CoinDesk from Digital Currency Group, and CoinDesk has since operated as an independent subsidiary of Bullish.Open the full entry article, Lily Liu defined the “Token Supercycle” as the long-term migration of money, assets, and ownership onto always-on internet infrastructure, rather than a round of purely price-driven token gains. She argued that four forces are converging: stablecoins have shown that money can move globally on-chain, financial institutions have begun bringing assets on-chain, blockchain performance and costs can support more real activity, and AI is creating software economic agents that need programmable money. She broke the impact of tokenization into three sides: issuers expand their capital reach through global distribution, hence “distribution is valuation”; investors gain cross-border, low-barrier ownership and the ability to borrow against assets, namely “universal basic ownership”; and applications can plug into payments, settlement, issuance, and markets via APIs, so that “any app can be a superapp.” The article also says AI agents can autonomously discover services, pay, and settle, and may take part in capital allocation.⁠[20]

As of September 2, 2026, Lily Liu was still appearing publicly as President of the Solana Foundation, a title usually translated in Chinese as chair of the foundation. In 2026, she named stablecoin settlement, tokenized assets, and internet capital markets as Solana’s main financial infrastructure directions, and argued that small, high-frequency transactions between AI agents require native digital payment rails. She cited the adoption of blockchain settlement by institutions such as Visa and Western Union as evidence of the trend, but the “AI machine economy” and future large IPOs on-chain remain forward-looking judgments.⁠[21]

On September 3, 2026, Solar (the Solana Chinese-language community) posted on X a clip of a Lily Liu interview featuring CNBCCNBCCNBC is an American business and financial news cable channel launched by NBC in 1989; it merged with its rival FNN in 1991 and since January 2026 has been part of Versant Media Group, spun off from Comcast.Open the full entry World footage, summarizing her remarks as: about 5.5 billion internet users worldwide use money, and money, assets, ownership, and markets will migrate to internet capital markets. In the clip, Liu described Solana’s goal as bringing online users and their assets into a single capital market, and saw always-on internet infrastructure as the distribution foundation for tokenized finance. This statement continues the “Token Supercycle” framework she set out in a bylined CoinDesk article the previous day; the 5.5 billion refers to the potential reach of the global internet population, not the number of users that Solana, cryptocurrency, or any on-chain product already has.⁠[22]