Here’s a fun tension within Solana’s leadership: the Foundation’s president thinks meme coins are useful stress tests for the network. The co-founder thinks it’s garbage. Both run on the same blockchain.
Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, said in a discussion with Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell that meme coins should be understood as a “production test” for network performance, not a defining feature of the ecosystem. By design, each degeneracy-fueled trading frenzy is effectively a live fire drill for Solana’s infrastructure.
Solana’s Reframing Was Necessary
Liu described meme coins as part of a broader spectrum of assets on Solana, ranging from pure speculation on one side to real utility on the other. She does not endorse meme coins as valuable financial products. She says they serve a mechanical purpose for the network, even if the tokens themselves are economically hollow.
Meme Coins accounted for approximately 62% of Solana’s dApp revenue as of June 2025. This is a staggering concentration of assets that, by design, have no core value proposition beyond mood and momentum.
Rather than denying this reality, Liu leans into it with a different narrative. The meme parts are not the product. Solana’s ability to process them at scale is the product.
The counterpoint to “digital slop”
Not everyone at Solana HQ is so diplomatic about this. Anatoly Yakovenko, the co-founder of the blockchain, called NFTs and meme coins “digital slop” with no intrinsic value. Where Liu sees a useful testing ground, Yakovenko apparently sees a landfill.
Solana’s coin moment didn’t come out of nowhere. Donald Trump’s $TRUMP meme token launched on Solana on January 18, catapulting the network into mainstream political discourse. Melania Trump’s meme token followed shortly after, quickly reaching a total value of around $1.6 billion. These were not obscure tokens exchanged between a few thousand degens. They were all over the news and they all ran the Solana tracks.
Beyond the same corners: the long-term infrastructure game
The Solana Foundation deploys post-quantum digital signatures on a testnet, an initiative to future-proof the network against quantum computing threats.
What this means for investors
For anyone holding SOL or building on Solana, the concentration of meme coins is worth watching closely. A 62% revenue share coming from meme coins means that the network’s financial health is closely tied to speculative cycles. When meme coin trading calms down, Solana’s revenue numbers could drop sharply.
