Lily Liu, President of Solana Foundation, said blockchain gaming no longer looks like a lasting growth area. Instead, she pointed to finance as the main use case for blockchain, tying her view to wider industry problems and to fresh doubts around large metaverse spending.
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Blockchain gaming once sold a big idea. Projects promised ownership, rewards, and new in-game economies. Yet Lily Liu now argues that model has lost its path.
Her view was direct. “Gaming on a blockchain is not coming back,” Liu said, casting doubt on a sector that spent years trying to sell Web3 gaming as a major next chapter for crypto.
She also took aim at play-to-earn games. In her view, that model does not create lasting fun or lasting value. That criticism hits at the heart of a big part of blockchain gaming, where many projects tried to attract users with token rewards instead of building games people would keep playing on their own.
At the same time, wider tech trends have made that argument harder to ignore. Meta has reportedly been rethinking parts of its metaverse strategy after pouring an estimated $80 billion into the effort. For many in crypto and tech, that has become a warning sign. Big spending and big vision do not always lead to products people want to use every day.
Liu used that backdrop to make a broader point about blockchain utility. Rather than chasing gaming or virtual-world hype, she said blockchain has always fit best in financial applications. “Blockchains have always been and always will be tech for finance. Their core purpose is financialization,” Liu explained.
That framing puts blockchain finance back at the center of the conversation. Areas like payments, stablecoins, trading, settlement, asset tokenization, and onchain financial infrastructure still give blockchain a clearer practical role than most game-related use cases. In other words, Liu sees more staying power in systems that handle money than in games built around token incentives.
Her comments is the signal of a wider reset across crypto. During earlier market cycles, blockchain gaming and metaverse projects pulled in attention, funding, and user growth. Now the focus has shifted. Builders and investors are paying more attention to products with clearer demand, cleaner economics, and real-world financial use.