Solana Foundation president Lily Liu says open meritocracy and positive-sum culture are why Solana outlasts bear markets. Here is what she means.
Solana Foundation president Lily Liu did not open with numbers. She opened with a philosophy. And depending on how seriously the industry takes it, that distinction might matter more than the price.
In a video shared by the official Solana account on X, Liu outlined what she believes separates the network from competitors that burn hot and fade. Not the tech. The culture.
“We’ve always been pretty open and tried to welcome the best builders,” Liu said, “and be supportive of the people who are building.”
The Meritocracy Nobody Talks About
That openness, according to Liu, is not a marketing line. It is operational. The foundation actively supports builders who compete with each other inside the same chain. That internal competition, she argued, is a feature. It trains the culture to tolerate rivalry without collapsing into protectionism.
She put it plainly on X: “We’ve tried to cultivate a culture of open meritocracy and let the best builders win, while also supporting builders on their journey.”
Most chains claim to support builders. Fewer will say out loud that they let those builders fight each other and back the winner anyway.
The Solana stablecoin volume surge to $650 billion recorded in February 2026 suggests whatever the foundation is doing at the culture level, the output is showing up on-chain. Whether those are related is a separate argument.
What Positive-Sum Actually Means Here
Liu described a deliberate practice of hunting for opportunities where multiple parties can benefit at once rather than extracting from a fixed pool. “It’s easy to find the zero-sum games,” she noted. “Those are the ones standing front and center.”
The harder work, and the one she said the foundation invests talent and capital into, involves finding games that do not yet exist. Building finance on the internet, she acknowledged, still sounds a little wild. “I don’t know who’s insane enough to try to do that,” she said.
That framing is deliberate. It positions the entire project as pre-competitive, at a stage where the real enemy is inertia rather than a rival chain.
Bear Markets as a Filter
Liu spent some time on what bear cycles actually expose. They are not just price drawdowns. They are, in her reading, moments when the industry self-sorts.
“In bear markets, a lot of people are looking to see who they can take a longer-term perspective with,” she said in the Solana X post. The zero-sum operators, she argued, tend to default in the iterated version of the game. Then builders start migrating toward whoever they can trust across cycles.
That dynamic shaped Solana’s positioning post-2022. The foundation placed long-term bets on builders willing to stay through the collapse.
Recent Solana ETF inflow data showing consistent capital entry across April 2026 reflects at minimum that institutional interest has not evaporated, whatever caused it.
The Long Game Thesis
Liu did not frame Solana’s success as a technical win. She framed it as a behavioral one. “Play positive-sum games, play the long game,” she said, “and you try to cultivate an open meritocracy.”
The chain built something that runs faster than most. She seemed more interested in what kind of people stuck around to run it.
Whether that reads as vision or revisionist history probably depends on where you were sitting in late 2022. The builders who made it through have an obvious reason to agree with her.