Solana Foundation President Says Web3 Gaming ‘Is Not Coming Back’

Solana Foundation president Lily Liu said blockchain gaming is dead in an X post today, March 20. A later, self-proclaimed “shitpost” from the Foundation’s chief product officer poked fun at Liu’s statement, but the original post had already set off a wave of comments, both criticizing Liu’s take, and defending the future of web3 gaming.

Liu’s statement, which reads “Also, gaming on a blockchain is not coming back,” was a response to a March 18 X post from Polymarket claiming that Meta, the parent company of Facebook, WhatsApp, and Instagram, is shutting down its metaverse project.

In what appears to be an act of self-aware irony, as of today, Liu’s X bio also says she is not only president, but also the “head of gaming” at Solana Foundation, a title that is absent from the exec’s LinkedIn and other profile bios.

No such role appears in any official Solana Foundation communications or staff listings The Defiant could find, strongly suggesting the title was meant to be ironic.

X account Solana Gaming added to the confusion with a post congratulating Liu on her new role as the Foundation’s head of gaming.

Liu has been notably dismissive of the blockchain gaming meta in recent months. In a more extended X post on Feb. 5, Liu said blockchain networks should focus on finance and tech for core use cases, writing:

“I am happy the misadventures around things like gaming in particular are fully dead and over.”

Solana Foundation’s president added, “This blockchain adventure has always been about finance: open financial rails for anyone and everyone on the internet.”

As The Defiant reported last April, MagicBlock’s $7.5 million seed round to build real-time gaming infrastructure on Solana was backed by Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko himself.

Web3 Gaming’s Struggle

As The Defiant reported previously, blockchain-based and crypto-integrated games have struggled to sustain demand. While monthly investments in web3 gaming projects were in the tens of millions of dollars last year, per data from DappRadar, that interest is far lower than capital flows during the sector’s peak in 2021, when blockchain games raked in a total of $4 billion from venture capital firms.

Is Meta’s Metaverse Also Dead?

The Polymarket post about Meta’s metaverse shutdown, which Liu’s post today was a response to, was itself notably misleading. As WIRED reported yesterday, what Meta actually announced was the shutdown of its online, multi-player game Horizon Worlds in VR, reportedly via an email to users on Tuesday.

However, the tech giant then quickly reversed course, with CTO Andrew Bosworth just days later stating that, in response to users, the company had decided to keep Horizon Worlds running in VR to support existing games and fans, though with limited support, and no new games or major investments.

This article was written with the assistance of AI workflows. All our stories are curated, edited and fact-checked by a human.