A fresh conversation about what blockchains are really for surfaced on X this week after Solana Foundation President Lily Liu shared a firm view on the technology’s core purpose.
Liu argued that blockchains have always been, and will always remain, financial infrastructure. In her words, their central role is financialisation, and the most important priority for any chain is protecting unified liquidity. She added that experiments in areas like gaming have largely faded, and suggested that much of the broader Web3 narrative over the past few years has been overly simplistic.
Her message was direct: the real promise of blockchain has always been open financial rails, enabling capital formation and economic freedom across the internet.
Dominic Williams, founder of DFINITY and creator of the Internet Computer, responded by rejecting the idea that blockchain should be defined only through finance.
“Lily, this claim is false,” he wrote, before pointing back to what he describes as the “World Computer” vision first laid out in 2014. In that framework, blockchain is positioned less as a financial engine and more as a decentralised form of cloud computing, capable of supporting a much wider range of applications.
Williams acknowledged that decentralised finance is one important use case, but stressed that many early builders saw finance as only part of what future onchain networks could host.
To support his point, he highlighted the current direction of the Internet Computer ecosystem. While ICP does support Bitcoin-related DeFi activity, including projects like Odin.fun, Williams said the network is increasingly being used by mainstream developers building applications that run fully onchain.
According to him, many of these builders are not focused on tokens at all. They see what they are creating as sovereign, tamperproof apps, with blockchain functioning as the infrastructure underneath rather than the product itself.
Williams noted that while the ICP token plays a role in powering the network economy, it is often abstracted away from the developer experience, meaning builders may pay through familiar models without directly engaging in crypto speculation.
He also placed this in the context of the broader cloud computing market, pointing to estimates of around $1 trillion in revenue last year and projections reaching $2 trillion by 2030. In his view, onchain computing tools such as Caffeine.ai aim to address that wider opportunity, rather than limiting blockchain to finance alone.
Williams further claimed that ICP is now seeing far higher numbers of people building applications each month than the number of developers building consumer-facing apps connected to Solana’s ecosystem. He argued that many of these builders are paying for premium services rather than relying on grants or venture-backed incentives, which he sees as a shift away from the traditional crypto growth model.
At the same time, Williams made clear his respect for Solana’s role within decentralised finance, suggesting it is well positioned as consolidation continues among chains focused mainly on DeFi.
Dom’s response ultimately reflects a broader effort to define blockchain’s next chapter beyond trading and speculation, presenting onchain infrastructure as a potential competitor in the future of cloud computing, not simply a tool for markets.
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