Here’s a fun tension inside Solana’s leadership: the Foundation’s president thinks meme coins are useful stress tests for the network. The co-founder thinks they’re garbage. Both of them work on the same blockchain.
Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, said during a discussion with Fundstrat’s Sean Farrell that meme coins should be understood as a “production test” for the network’s performance, not as a defining feature of the ecosystem. In her framing, every degen-fueled trading frenzy is actually a live fire drill for Solana’s infrastructure.
The reframe Solana needed
Liu described meme coins as part of a broader spectrum of assets on Solana, ranging from pure speculation on one end to genuine utility on the other. She’s not endorsing meme coins as valuable financial products. She’s saying they serve a mechanical purpose for the network, even if the tokens themselves are economically hollow.
Meme coins accounted for roughly 62% of Solana’s dApp revenue in June 2025. That’s a staggering concentration in assets that, by design, have no fundamental value proposition beyond vibes and momentum.
Rather than deny that reality, Liu is leaning into it with a different narrative. The meme coins aren’t the product. Solana’s ability to process them at scale is the product.
The ‘digital slop’ counterpoint
Not everyone at Solana HQ is quite so diplomatic about it. Anatoly Yakovenko, the blockchain’s co-founder, has referred to NFTs and meme coins as “digital slop” with no intrinsic value. Where Liu sees a useful proving ground, Yakovenko apparently sees a landfill.
Solana’s meme coin moment didn’t emerge from 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 rising to about $1.6B in total value. These weren’t obscure tokens traded among a few thousand degens. They were headline news, and they all ran on Solana’s rails.
Beyond meme coins: the long-term infrastructure play
The Solana Foundation is deploying post-quantum digital signatures on a testnet, an initiative aimed at future-proofing the network against quantum computing threats.
What this means for investors
For anyone holding SOL or building on Solana, the meme coin concentration is worth watching carefully. A 62% revenue share from meme coins means the network’s financial health is tightly coupled to speculative cycles. When meme coin trading cools, Solana’s revenue metrics could drop sharply.
