Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation, shouted "Don't waste time on crypto," is the crypto industry really dead?

Author: Chloe, ChainCatcher

Peter Steinberger, the founder of the open-source project OpenClaw, responded to a user's question on X yesterday, "What advice do you have for young people in their 20s?" His answer was just one sentence: "don't waste time with crypto." This tweet was subsequently retweeted by Lily Liu, the chair of the Solana Foundation, who also posted the exact same sentence.

The two tweets collectively garnered over a million views, and the comments section quickly filled with skepticism. Is Lily Liu really making a sarcastic rebuttal? Or does it mean that the crypto industry is on the verge of extinction?

Steinberger has reasons for his disdain for the industry, but what about Lily?

OpenClaw, which was previously known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, officially launched under its current name on January 30 of this year. The project has already garnered over 200,000 stars on GitHub, becoming a rare phenomenon in the open-source community.

After the project went viral, a lot of noise unrelated to technical development followed, with speculators flooding the community urging for token issuance, trying to capitalize on the project's popularity. As a result, Steinberger developed a strong aversion to the crypto industry. He even implemented a complete ban on Discord, where any mention of "crypto" or "bitcoin" would lead to immediate bans (regardless of whether it was promotion, spam, or pure technical discussion).

According to CoinDesk, the background and cause of the ban stemmed from January when the project was still called Clawdbot and decided to rebrand due to a trademark warning from Anthropic. During the brief window of a few seconds between releasing the old GitHub/X account and registering a new one, someone immediately hijacked the account and launched a fake $CLAWD token on Solana.

The fake token's market cap surged to $16 million within hours, and after Steinberger publicly denied it, it plummeted over 90%, leaving latecomers with significant losses. He was subsequently harassed by victims, leading him to publicly state: "Please crypto community, stop harassing me. I will never issue a token; anyone labeling me as a token holder is a scam!"

In this context, his statement about not wasting time with crypto is a direct response to the ongoing harassment, with a clear target, and is not a blanket denial of cryptocurrency as a technology or asset class.

Lily's situation is entirely different. In the face of heightened attention from the market towards Steinberger's original post, she chose not only to retweet but also to personally reiterate the same sentence. External interpretations roughly fall into two categories: one sees it as a pessimistic signal regarding the industry's current state; the other believes the statement itself is sarcastic, pointing to specific behavioral patterns within the crypto industry rather than the industry as a whole.

However, regardless of Lily's true intent, the market response to her statement has been largely negative. Several industry figures have publicly criticized her, arguing that this move is clearly inconsistent with her identity and responsibilities. "As the chair of the foundation, it’s like telling holders that what they are betting on isn’t worth it. Whether it's a joke or not, this signal itself is very bad."

However, it must be acknowledged that in the current industry narrative, the rapid issuance of tokens, the creation of short-term wealth effects, and the lack of substantial technological development have long been core issues discussed within the industry. The long-term overdraft of this ecosystem has accelerated the outflow of capital and talent, with AI being the primary recipient of these resources.

With capital and talent fleeing, where does the crypto industry go from here?

Notable investor Stanley Druckenmiller mentioned in an interview with Morgan Stanley that the younger generation's interest is shifting from cryptocurrencies to the field of artificial intelligence.

This aligns with the current phenomenon in the crypto industry, where a significant number of technical talents and early-stage venture capital are concentrating in the AI direction, and the narrative heat in the crypto market has dropped to freezing point.

Upon careful consideration, the current AI industry is still in the early stages of infrastructure development and technological capability expansion, characterized primarily by value creation. The technological dividends have yet to be fully released, the entrepreneurial window remains open, and the return expectations for early participants are relatively clear. The flow of young talent in this direction is a rational response to real opportunities, rather than an active abandonment of cryptocurrencies.

Historically, the development of mobile internet also underwent a similar phase evolution. In the later stages of the value creation cycle, when technological dividends become saturated and market competition compresses entrepreneurial returns, capital and attention begin to seek new outlets. The concentrated explosion of the cryptocurrency market in 2017 coincided with the maturity phase of the mobile internet, which to some extent confirms that the initiation of a value redistribution cycle is often accompanied by new asset classes absorbing overflow capital.

Whether the development cycle of AI will follow a similar path remains to be seen. However, if we take this as a reference, when homogeneous competition in the AI market begins to lower overall entrepreneurial returns and market attention starts to drift away from AI, the cycle of value redistribution will truly begin. At that stage, the crypto market, with its lower asset thresholds and higher liquidity, will still hold appeal for the younger generation with limited capital accumulation and will not be permanently overlooked due to today's short-term attention shift.

For the crypto industry, the maturation process of any emerging industry cannot bypass this stage: the loss of attention, valuation corrections, and the clearing of speculative projects are all components of the industry cycle, not the endpoint.

Tides rise and fall; this is the norm. What truly deserves attention is what remains after the low tide.

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